GSoC - Ubuntu and Mir participation

[Robert Ancell]

On 25/03/13 20:24, Thomas Voß 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.
>  * Provide a Mir-backend for SDL (2.0).
>  * Provide a Mir-backend for GTK 3.
>
> What do you think? Makes sense? Any additions?
>
> Thanks,
>
>   Thomas
>

Other ideas:
- Support for colour management
- Support for Wacom tablets

However, in saying this GSOC is a not insignificant amount of work to be
a mentor (in my and others experiences) and many projects do not provide
any useful output. So if we do GSOC work it's important to:
- Limit the number of projects we have running
- Only accept highly motivated and capable students

--Robert