[fpc-devel] Summer of code collaboration

[Jonas Maebe]

On 10 Feb 2013, at 22:32, Vittorio Giovara wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be>wrote:
> 
>> I don't remember ever hearing about this or seeing a bug report about
>> this. It's unlikely that this is related to FPC vs LLVM code or debug info
>> generation though. And adding support for LLVM is something different than
>> adding support for LLVM + LLVM debug information. The two are completely
>> decoupled, and one will not automatically get you the other.
>> 
>> 
> I wasn't fully aware of that, thanks for the explanation. Yeah as first
> project, a LLVM backend support is more than enough, isn't it?
> I'll try to reproduce the bug I mentioned with a more recent build of fpc
> and open a ticket if it's still present.

Please also test with a clean project from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28343282/ObjP/index.html to make sure it's not due to some project setting.

>> c) from the GSoC mentors list, I've understood that the best students are
>> generally people who were already involved with the project (on the mailing
>> lists, by submitting patches, ...). They are familiar with the project, the
>> way contributions are handled, expectations of the existing developers
>> regarding new code, and there is more chance that they are interested in
>> working on the project in the long term (contributed code that is not
>> maintained afterwards is much less valuable, because we already have a lot
>> of code to maintain; if you have to maintain code, it's generally easier to
>> do so if you wrote it yourself)
>> 
>> 
> For (b) it fully makes sense. For (c) there is a long period between
> student selection and start of the project, where student can approach
> organizations and contribute to them; generally the students who are
> already capable of providing patches have higher chances of being accepted
> (although that's not always the case). If you think having a student is
> something useful we can highlight the "collaboration" on each organisation
> website in order to get maximum visibility, but it's the mentor who has to
> pick the right student in the end.
> What about (d) is this project feasible? If not, is it can you split in
> (parallel) sub projects so that more people can tackle it?

I really don't know whether it is feasible. There is definitely a lot of work that needs to be done to get a clean result, some of it fairly tedious (such as creating complete type definitions for types that are currently opaque in the compiler, like VMT layouts and RTTI). I'm now leaving on holidays for 3 weeks, maybe I'll have a better idea when I come back :)


Jonas