2010 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

This year’s Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit again fell on the same weekend as BeGeistert. This year Niels was able to make the trip. Niels and I attended the summit representing Haiku. We attended some of the same sessions but split up for others. As was the case last year we met a lot of developers from the other orgs, some I had met either at last years summit or other open source events. I talked with the VLC, FFMpeg and BeagleBoard guys on Friday night. One (or more) of the beagleboard.org guys works for TI in Community Development, and was exited to hear that Haiku was working on an Arm port and suggested he may be able to hook us up with Free Hardware. We may just have to cover the taxes to get such hardware to a developer in Europe is all. I have contacted him and will post an update on this when we get a response.

Here’s the group picture. click to see larger view

Here are the sessions I attended:

Static Code Analysis http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Static_Code_Analysis This session was led by Andreas Schiffler, he was there for SDL and is the main author of the sdl-gfx library. This session talked about the different tools being used for static code anaysis, including Coverity and others.

Open Source Multimedia - mostly talked about the wide variety of mobile platforms and the difficultly in porting to such devices, with the various DSPs and such.

Testing OSes - This was a gathering of the various OS groups, talking about test coverage.

http://etherpad.osuosl.org/fossgaming This one talked a lot about how to get non-coders involved in FOSS projects, such as artists.

Google Code-In - http://etherpad.osuosl.org/Google-Code-In - This was a good session, and was given by Carol from Google. She gave a short talk on what GCI was and her vision, then answered many questions. After getting our questions answered Niels and I got to talking. After the session, we drafted up an email to send out to the Haiku and Haiku dev mailing list to get feedback to see what the level of interest in participating in this would be in the Haiku community. We have since applied for Google Code-in and should know on November 5th if we are selected for GCI 2010.

Sunday offered another group of interesting sessions.

http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/OperatingSystemSession - http://etherpad.osuosl.org/SuperSecretOSRoom - This session included most of the groups from the Saturday OS testing session plus a handful of others. Talk was mostly about how we could collaborate and help each other. One of the key topics was about a POSIX test suite that could be used by all. FreeBSD already has one mostly done, but some work may be needed to make it more accessible to all. This was a carry over from last years successful session and we agreed that we should have a similar OS Summit meeting at future GSoC summits.

Advanced trolling – http://etherpad.osuosl.org/advanced-trolling This was mostly a comedy routine, but was pretty entertaining none the less.

Remote Sprint – http://etherpad.osuosl.org/remotesprint

LLVM – http://openetherpad.com/llvm This session included most of the group from the OS sessions but also a lot of others and was held in the largest room. Mostly they talked about the different experiences moving over to LLVM and the various reasons people are moving over to it.

Should GSoC be doubled? http://etherpad.osuosl.org/double This was another session given by Carol from GSoC. She wants to make GSoC even bigger, perhaps doubling it’s size. The overall feeling though was that it could probably grow by about 25% or so. Maybe add 25-50 more orgs and 200 or 300 more students. Guess we’ll see in February what they settle on. But Google doesn’t pre-announce anything… so there’s no confirmation yet that there’s going to be a GSoC 2011.

Here’s the link to the session notes from all of the sessions: http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Session_Notes_2010

I’ll let Niels write about the sessions he attended if he wants.

-scottmc