[Mailman-Developers] GSoc - Requirement from Mentor to complete the project

[Richard Wackerbarth]

Abhilash,
Thanks for responding promptly and publicly.

You, and the others should expect the discussions you mention without including them in response to my question.
The discussion with your mentor is "given" -- That's one of the main responsibilities of a mentor.
You may need to initiate community discussion about parts of your design to assure that your design meets the community expectations.

But let me take your project as an example of the kind of input that I am seeking.

You propose to use public key crypto in the processing stream of mail messages.
In order to do so, you will need to associate the appropriate key with the corresponding user.
You will also need to have some configuration parameters that describe the list policy and handling of the encryption.

Now, I suggest that you need, but might reasonably expect someone else to provide, the following:

1) A framework for storing the keys and handling the association of the key with a particular user.
This same framework would be used to associate other methods of identification and authentication with the users.
You would be expected to implement the parts that are specific to public key.

2) A mechanism to display and edit parameters that describe the list policy as it refers to encryption.
Again, as above, you would specify the parameters and provide the handlers that implement the policies, but you can expect someone else to handle the GUI presentation that turn them on and off, or otherwise configure them.

I won't claim that the items that I suggest above are sufficient, or perhaps even necessary, but they can be used as examples for the kind of input that I am encouraging all of the applicants to discuss.

There are other applicants who have proposed to develop, for example, GUI components. They should "step up" and declare that their proposed work will provide <some aspect that you need>. Thus, we can observe that the projects complement each other.

I hope to see this discussion continue.

As for "mentor review" of your design.  Let me point out that you do not have to be accepted by GSoC in order to contribute to MM development. I know that I, and I believe the other mentors, as well as other members of the community, would be quite willing to discuss "design" with anyone who wishes to help improve the overall system.
That discussion can start at any time. We don't need to wait for the GSoC positions to be announced.

Again, thanks for your participation.

Richard


On May 5, 2013, at 7:23 AM, Abhilash Raj <raj.abhilash1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In response to Richard's mail these are the rough bits of what I will be needing from my mentor if I am selected:
> 
> 1) I need to discuss

> Abhilash Raj