GSoC - Ubuntu and Mir participation

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 6:24 PM, Thomas Voß 
<thomas.voss at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> reposting a message from Dylan McCall regarding Ubuntu's GSoC
> participation, please see a list of potential Mir topics at the end of
> the mail:
> 
> We're going to be applying for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year.
> I'm sure many of you know the drill at this stage: it's an opportunity
> to grow Ubuntu's developer community, share knowledge with talented
> university students, make friends and get some really cool work done. 
> We
> have a wiki page all about GSoC 2013 that explains the hows and whys 
> in
> detail:
> 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2013
> 
> Since the last GSoC we participated in, Ubuntu has really found its 
> own
> with several projects led by Canonical and by members of the 
> community.
> As I see it, Unity, Juju, Ubuntu Touch and Mir are interesting 
> projects
> that students would enjoy contributing to, and they are all projects
> that students would be best equipped to work on with Ubuntu as the
> mentoring organization. And, of course, there are many more where 
> those
> came from! I already mentioned that there are many lovely benefits for
> the students and for Ubuntu, and I'll also point out that this is a 
> way
> to really expand on the community-friendly nature of those projects. I
> think it would be amazing if we could make that happen.
> 
> So, this is where you come in! Do you have an idea for a project that 
> we
> could empower a student to work on over the summer? Are you interested
> in mentoring one of those talented and motivated students? Either way,
> you're welcome to add what you see fit to our list of ideas and 
> mentors:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2013/Ideas.
> 
> Thank you,
> Dylan McCall
> 
> From the top of my head, the following topics w.r.t. Mir might make 
> good
> candidates for GSoC:
> 
>  * Behavior driven testing: Pick up Robert Carr's work on 
> Cucumber-based
> testing approaches, enhance it and potentially make it reusable by 
> Unity.
>  * Integrate Mir with a performance-metrics collection system (either
> Performance CoPilot or collectd) and capture a set of pre-defined
> metrics for our CI and/or Autolanding scenarios.
> 
These look to me like they'd be interesting, achievable, and sufficient 
work.


>  * Provide a Mir-backend for SDL (2.0).
>  * Provide a Mir-backend for GTK 3.
> 

I don't think these would be good candidates - they rely on core work 
not yet done, and once that core work is done I'm not sure they'll be 
enough work for a GSoC. I guess both together might be?