SoC 2007

There's a great introduction on git for SVN people like me, which made it twice as easy for me to look into how this thing works. Git only recently released their 1.5 version which is the first one that's supposed to be usable to the masses. (It might not yet be available pre-packaged for your Linux distribution, or available at all if you're running Windows, which could be a small hurdle at the beginning.) After reading the introductory couse and trying it out by myself, I must say I'm hooked.

For those who didn't know, git is the distributed RCS that was created by Linus and the other kernel folks because they needed to get rid of BitKeeper, and as the Linux kernel is a very demanding project both in code size and in patch management, git is quite capable indeed from an efficiency point of view. Currently in use by the Linux kernel itself, X.org, Wine, and One Laptop Per Child, to name a few popular projects.

As promised in my SoC application, here's a short rundown of features that are important to this abstraction layer.

So that's that. After having used the past two months for improving filefield and imagefield, it's about time that I get started with my RCS abstraction project. aclight has been as kind as to publish his work and findings in time with the Summer of Code, so that's a good starting point already. His work on the xcvs scripts (...bootstrapping Drupal, yay) benefits my project a lot, and the issues with password storage are good to know of.

In order to come up with a set of good questions that I'll need to research, I had a first shot on the database schema and the overall idea of how this thing should work. I thought it would be a good idea to see what we want to achieve and what we can rely on, before figuring out how to abstract all the stuff that's supposed to be different among the various revision control systems. Bullet points galore.

Drupal is used as a content management system (CMS) for various purposes; due its power relies on the modules and the fulfillment of all the needs / additional features / patches that has been arisen. However, auto-completion is still left out, except for auto-complete of user name.

Significance:

I've spoken with Josh K of the Drupal Dojo group (which, if you don't know about it, definitely go check it out -- it's like interactive peer-tutoring but so much cooler ;)). He's given me permission to hijack the Sunday, May 27 session slot to do a Q&A session for the Summer of Code students, to answer any questions you folks have before Summer of Code officially kicks off the next day!

The session will start at 11am PDT (California), which is (apparently) 2PM in NYC, 8PM in Hungary, 10PM in Moscow, and 11:30 PM in Sri Lanka (sorry :). It will go on for about 2 hours (or until we run out of steam). The session will also be recorded (both audio and screen) for those who can't make it. Others are more than welcome to show up too (I'm sure the information discussed will be valuable to a lot of folks), but I'd like this to be a session specifically geared toward getting our GSoCers up to speed.

So, what I need to know from folks is a list of questions/clarifications/general topics they'd like covered in this session. Long ago, in a kingdom far away, we came up with an outline as follows: http://docs.drupaldojo.org/getting-started-with-drupal-development ... anything in particular here (or that you've come across in the last few weeks) that grabs your fancy? We can walk you through parts of core, talk about higher-level API stuff, get into community history, explain how to use CVS, or just about anything else you can think of. :)

I'd like to hammer out a tentative agenda sometime towards the end of next week, so please comment and let me know what you'd like to see covered! Also, if as many mentors/students as possible could make it to this session, we could have a nice little introduction thing at the beginning. :)

We have 15 Wikis Set Up. As a thank you to Drupal for providing some excellent experimental software for us, we are going to let you use them as test beds / whiteboards / collaboration tools. I am providing the space - you can do what you want with it. I'll try to keep it clean. Hopefully things will be best when they are self governed.

I have also installed Moodle and a PHPChat and a phpBB for use, and I have plenty of space for people if they need to make a Wordpress Blog.

So, my Summer of Code proposal was accepted and I figured I would start off with a post. For my project I'll be fixing up private vs public file handling in Drupal, which as I found out after awhile of talking to a handful of Drupal devs needed some work. I had originally been inspired by Wim Leer's proposal for a Drupal bittorrent tracker. It's a really cool proposal and I'm glad that it was picked up by someone else. That made me think, mirroring files must be a real pain, so automated mirroring with some metalink goodness would be pretty cool.

Well, who would have imagined that we'd get 20 projects? That's just fantastic. Thanks to all the mentors who helped out with the evaluating, and congratulations to all of the students. We look forward to working with you this summer.

This mail has some important information that you need for getting started, so please read it carefully. Before I to the serious business, though, take a moment and help promote GSoC and Drupal:
http://digg.com/software/Google_Summer_of_Code_projects_Drupal_s_20

First steps

I put in my application for the Summer of Code last week with the following proposal

Proposal V1[PDF]

I based the goals of it off of the proposed idea at http://drupal.org/node/121112. After receiving some feedback on my application I revised my time line without much change in the actual proposal. The new proposal is at

Proposal V2[PDF]

In the downtime between comment posts on my application I contacted the current module owner and started to become more involved in the community, a few forum posts and more research on my project. With the second round of comments down and an extremely revamped proposal I am looking forward to more comments and assistance from the community. Well here is the third proposal and the abstract.

Proposal V3[PDF]