[Moin-user] GSOC: daily commits / "blogging" / what to do now

[Thomas Waldmann]

Hi Dmitrijs (and all other students),

> * Workflow. Should we agree on some way, how i work on the project. In
> the moin requirements it is said that at leas one push must be maid
> every day. Should i write (weekly) reports, describing what i've done,
> what and how i'm going do do? It can be blogposts, messages to the
> mailinglist, or pages in the wiki.

About the commits: Doing a daily commit should be no problem. Most
developers try to commit rather often and try to do small and clean
commits rather than large or unclean ones.

I think using the last 15..30 minutes of the day to do some report about
what you've done that day, what worked, what didn't work, new insights,
plans for tomorrow, etc. would be great. If you didn't work on the
project for a work day long, you can just tell "I took <TIME> off-time
from the project."

I guess that report is pretty useful not only for the moin community and
your mentor to see what's going on (as this is an internet project, we
don't see you working "life", so you need to show somehow), but also for
yourself to reflect about what you do and plan to do.

You can do this either on a blog or some wiki page (whatever you use,
link it from your wiki home page).

There will be also a fixed weekly ~1h IRC meeting of ALL mentors and
students with students shortly reporting about similar topic (so that we
are all in sync :). If you did 

> * Modular group handling is my first project. I have link to the
> hg-repo of the previous soc project which is related to this, i'm
> going to study it, in a week. Also, I would like to study moin 1.9
> codebase to get familiar with it. Any other links, ideas, I can do
> before real coding?

Dmitrijs: In your case, aside from studying the code (== looking at it),
you could also try to run it and play with it, look at the changesets
from last year and make up your mind what we want to keep and what we
want to do differently.

In general, setting up your development machine (with vim + pep8 plugin,
eclipse/pydev, or whatever else), Mercurial, Python and a local moin
wiki (can be standalone server and/or mod-wsgi) is also a good idea for
now: You shouldn't waste the first week of your coding time to reinstall
your computer and set up all that stuff.

Also: if you must or like to use tools you are not familiar with yet,
get familiar with them NOW. E.g. Eclipse/PyDev can be a great tool, but
you'll need some days to get familiar with it.

You should also refine your plans and discuss them IN DETAIL with your
mentor and the moin community. If something is a bit unclear and vague,
try to make it clear NOW, so that you have a good plan about what to
code when coding phase starts.

Cheers,

Thomas