GSOC candidature draft for urgent feedback

[Philippe Ombredanne]

Dmitry and all:
here is the draft content of the GSOC candidature submission I will
make later today.
The deadline for submission is near to time is of the essence

The project ideas web page is here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/strace/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCode2014/
Please add as needed your ideas

Cheers
Philippe Ombredanne

======================================================================
1. Describe your organization.

strace is a system call tracer, i.e. a debugging tool which prints out
a trace of all the system calls made by a another process/program.

strace is one of the longest running open source projects and started
even before Linux started.

strace is an important tool for debugging and tracing deployed on all
Linux distribution and most Unix with a small community of active
contributors and usage in many other open source projects (among
others Android and Chromium use and rely on strace.)

While strace is a small project the strace tool is essential for many
developers and open source projects. Its maintainers and contributors
are experienced developers (contributors include Linux Torvalds among
many others). See
http://sourceforge.net/p/strace/code/ci/master/tree/CREDITS.in

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer
of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We want engage with students that are interested in system programming
and want to help making strace a better tool.
We hope to gain new long term contributors and interesting and new features.

3. Has your organization participated in past Google Summer of Codes? (yes/no)

No

4. If you answered “yes” to the question above, please summarize your
involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

N/A

5. If your organization has not previously participated in Google
Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

N/A

6. What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?

BSD, 3 clauses: see https://sourceforge.net/p/strace/code/ci/master/tree/COPYING

7. What is the URL for your Ideas list? **This is the most important
part of your proposal. Please make sure we can access it and it is
complete when you submit this proposal. “Placeholder” or inaccessible
ideas pages will be grounds for an automatic rejection for
participation in Google Summer of Code2014.**

http://sourceforge.net/p/strace/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCode2014/

8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/strace-devel

9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

The project does not use IRC. All communications are going through the
mailing list at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/strace-devel including
patches.
This is simple and is very similar to the Linux kernel ways.

10. Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Dmitry V. Levin, core maintainer

11. What criteria did you use to select the mentors? Please be as
specific as possible.

Mentors must be active contributors and committers and are willing to
dedicate personal time during the GSOC project to coach students
successfully.

12. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please
be as specific as possible.

We will try to address the issue one on one with the student first. If
the work cannot be resumed, we will notify the GSOC program and report
the student as failing but considering the contributions already
completed in context before declaring a failure.

13. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be
as specific as possible.

We plan to assign a backup mentor to each student. We will try to
address the issue one on one with the mentor then. We will solicit
alternative mentors or the administrators will pick up the slack.

14. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with
your project's community before, during and after the program?

All the interactions taking place through a single mailing list, the
students will have to use this list to discuss their proposal and to
interact directly with the community.
Longer term, participating in the community means that the student
names will added the list of contributors and their contribution
widely used by all strace users.

15. Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization
to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.

Chromium developers for the swarming project at
https://code.google.com/p/swarming/  may vouch for the importance of
strace, since they depend on it.

Same for the maintainers of the strace package in Android:
https://github.com/android/platform_external_strace

16. Are you an established or larger organization who would like to
vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list
their name(s) here.

N/A

17. What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick
with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

We will encourage students to stick around by having their
contributions recognized by the community. Continuous contribution to
strace could be a valuable resume item for these students.