Welcome to Samba, Google Summer of Code 2011 students

[Kai Blin]

Hello everybody,

on behalf of the Samba Team, I would like to congratulate the students
accepted into this year's incarnation of Google Summer of Code.

We're currently in the community bonding phase before the actual coding
starts on May 23rd. This is a good time to get you set up with a Samba
repository on gitorious.org, and to explain the other things we would
like you to do.

To get your repository on gitorious, first create an account with
https://gitorious.org/. After your account is activated and you've
uploaded a SSH public key to the site (follow their instructions), go to
https://gitorious.org/samba-gsoc and click the "clone repository" button
to clone your copy of the repository.

Some of the requirements mentioned here will not apply to Pavel, who is
working on the kernel module. If in doubt, talk to your mentor or ask me.

First of all, I would like to ask everybody who hasn't already done so
to write an email to the samba-technical mailing list, introducing
themselves and their projects.


Then, starting on May 23rd, each of you should start sending weekly
status reports to samba-technical. The status report should contain
information on
 * what you were doing the previous week
 * where you ran into problems
 * how you solved the problems
 * what you are planning to work on this week
 * what possible problems you might face
 * how you plan on solving those

The weekly status reports serve multiple purposes. First of all, they
keep the community on the list informed what is going on with your
project. This allows people who are not your mentors to comment on your
plans based on their experience with the code. Another reason for the
status reports is that they force you to think about your programming
plans from a bit further away once a week, and allow you to evaluate
last week's predictions based on the actual progress. This will be hard
to get right at first, but it's an important skill to learn if you want
to work as a programmer. Nobody expects you to get this right all of the
time, but you will find it useful to learn doing work estimates.


In addition to the weekly status reports to the samba-technical mailing
list, you should send a daily short update to your mentor before you
start working. The goal of this email is similar to the weekly status
email, just on a more narrow scope. Think of it as the equivalent to a
Scrum daily standup meeting (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)#Meetings). The daily
status mail should contain:
 * what did you do since yesterday
 * what are you planning to do today
 * are there any outside problems that would prevent you from reaching
your goal today

Keep that email short, it's main purpose is to get you to think about
your work before you start working and to keep your mentor informed of
what you do and what problems you're running into. If you need help from
your mentor, this is a good place to ask for it if you can't get hold of
your mentor in IRC.


You need to push your code to your gitorious repository at least once a
week, though pushing more frequently is strongly recommended. Keep the
individual patches small, this will make getting them reviewed and
getting them into the main samba repository much, much easier.


While these seem like a lot of rules, I have found they actually help
making development much easer and thus more fun. If you have any further
questions about GSoC, don't hesitate to email me (or Jelmer), we're
happy to help. Again, welcome to Samba, I'm looking forward to working
with all of you during the next months.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
Worldforge developer http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/