[Mailman-Developers] GSoC Project: pgp plugin

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Abhilash Raj writes:

Thanks for picking this up, Abhilash!

Jonas writes:

 > > However, at the moment I'm in the middle of writing my Project Proposal.
 > > May I send you a draft along with personal questions?

If you mean do I like cats, I don't see what that has to do with
GSoC. ;-)  If you mean specific to your proposal, no, it doesn't work
that way.  Mentors aren't tutors, and your proposal isn't to one or
more potential mentors, it's to the project.  The project decides what
proposals to accept, subject to mentor availability.  The project
decides whether your design is appropriate, whether your code is
effective, complete, and so on.  Once a mentor is assigned, he or she
is responsible as the front-line delegate of the project to manage
your work, to help you with work processes, and the backstop to ensure
that technical questions are answered quickly.

On the other hand, most technology and project process questions can
be answered by any developer, and GSoC questions by any mentor.  So in
general you can post any Mailman questions here.  GSoC questions can
be asked on the GSoC "general" or "students" mailing lists, or here.
Note that everybody in open source is stretched very thin during GSoC
applications; asking questions in the right place is much more likely
to get you good answers quickly.  If you need authoritative answers on
GSoC, Stephanie and Cat monitor the GSoC lists so you will get useful
answers there.

If you're worried that other students will benefit from your questions
and our answers -- this is open source, giving others the benefit of
our work is the point of what we're doing!  It's not just altruistic;
there are mechanisms for compensating you.  You still get credit for
(1) openness itself and (2) working with us.  If somebody steals your
ball and runs off with it, they had better be just as cooperative and
open or they lose points (and either way, you still maintain an edge
due to being first in and getting things rolling).

 > > And/Or Abhilash Raj, may I send you those?
 > 
 > I guess you can upload drafts of proposal (in google docs) on
  > GSoC's website and we all mentors can have a look at it/comment on
 > it if needed.

Please do register and upload a draft as soon as possible, even if
very incomplete.  The Google SoC system is all-new this year, and has
been distinctly slow the last day or two since student applications
opened.  I don't expect it to crash, but if it does, *it is not an
excuse for not being registered*!  That's Google policy; if you don't
have an application on file by the deadline date, you *cannot* become
a GSoC intern.  We have zero input to this policy.  OTOH, we can work
around incompleteness in the event of system problems.

I haven't seen the student UI, but I've heard that you can mark your
proposal "draft" (or maybe you have to mark it "final", which amounts
to the same thing).  So you don't have to worry that an incomplete
draft will count against you (in Mailman, we don't make judgments
until applications close in any case).

If the draft seems *wrong* in some place, we'll let you know about
that quickly.  If it's still incomplete on 3/22 or so, we'll ping you
about that.

 > > To make a first impression, I thought about writing a general
 > > blog post on the state of mailinglist/group communication
 > > encryption that covers the efforts toward encrypted lists in
 > > mailman.

That's a good idea in itself, but not a substitute for a patch.

 > > Could that work as a first impression instead of fixing
 > > a bug in mailman? The easier ones seem to get patched faster than
 > > I can catch up.
 > 
 > We need you to fix one easy bug so as to judge your capability to
 > actually implement the proposal that you are proposing.

That's somewhat inaccurate.  The reasons you need to fix a *Mailman*
bug are

1.  You have to post a merge request, which means
2.  you know a little bit about our Gitlab repos, and
3.  a little bit about Gitlab, and
4.  have a Gitlab account.

That might not be a problem for you, but we've had issues in the past
where the student floundered for a couple weeks midproject with the
registration and submission procedure.

To judge implementation ability, other projects you've done or
contributed to are valid evidence, of course, as long as you can point
us to the code.

 > I can point you to several places we need more documentation ;-)

I don't care who does it (Abhilash direct-to-tracker, or Abhilash-to-
Jonas-to-tracker), but please make sure all are filed on the tracker.