Difference between revisions of "Summer of Code/Application/2007"

This is the application of the [http://www.scummvm.org ScummVM] project for the [http://code.google.com/soc Google Summer of Code]. Let's start with a quick overview of the facts before turning to the more elaborate parts of this document

One of the corner stones of ScummVM's success is its extreme portability. Besides running on all main stream desktop environments, be it Windows, Mac OS X or most Unix variants (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...), it works on game consoles (Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and more), smart phones and PDAs (WinCE, PalmOS or Symbian based), and even on many not-so-mainstream systems (like BeOS, AmigaOS or OS/2).

This high portability is made possible by the flexible and modular structure of the ScummVM internals, which more or less falls into the following three categories:  

# Backends (responsible for support of specific target devices, like PalmOS or WinCE, etc.)

# Infrastructure code, providing portable access to audio (including MIDI), graphics, user input, data access , a custom graphical user interface, and more

* Packagers -- not all ports require dedicated backends (e.g. we have on built around the SDL library, which itself is highly portable), but they still require somebody to test and compile them, which is where porters come in

Furthermore, all of our developers work on ScummVM in their spare time. But for certain tasks, it's simply best if you can spend a certain time working on this task more or less exclusively -- i.e. just what we would get via the SoC.

Hence, we hope to gain some nice shiny new code providing useful new functionality to our users and developers. Even if the authors don't stick around will this benefit all of the ScummVM community.

Lastly, we also believe that we can learn a lot from this whole event in terms of interaction with prospective new team members, how to motivate students to participate in our projects etc., knowledge that may turn out to be very valuable outside of the SoC, too.

Our mentors were selected as volunteers from the development team, who are already intimately familiar with the internals of ScummVM, our coding conventions etc.. All three are familiar with guiding people (in particular, students) through project work effectively (in fact, two of them happen to be lead developers of ScummVM). As such, we are convinced that we are able to guide interested students through the Summer of Code to the net benefit of all involved parties.

We hope that nobody will disappear, but we plan to take a proactive approach, i.e. we will try to minimize the risk of a loss of communication; but if it happens, we are prepared to deal with it, too.

For the mentors, the risk is relatively low; two are project leads and are virtually 24/7 reachable (in case of emergencies). We all have exchanged sufficient contact information (including cell phone numbers etc.) to be able to discover our whereabouts etc. Should something really bad happen (like somebody ending up in hospital and hence unable to work, a natural disaster, etc.), we will attempt to shift students to new mentors (among the existing mentors, or drawn from our backup pool of mentors). This will depend on the number of students we have to mentor.

As for the students, for starters we plan to exchange as much communication data as possible (cell phone numbers, postal addresses etc.). Through a friendly atmosphere we hope to minimize the risk of any student being "afraid" to report problems they might have etc.. On the other hand, we will make it clear that we expect dedicated work of the students and that unannounced/unjustified disappearances will draw consequences, like negative reports or even the failure of the whole project. Still, establishing a positive and friendly connection between student and mentor will be the cornerstone of our efforts in this regard. If the students trusts the mentor and tells him about his fear, uncertainties and problems early on, they can try to find a solution together, possibly with the help of the rest of the team. Also, integrating the students into our community should reduce the likelihood of disappearances further (see also the next section).

Our community uses forums, IRC, Wiki and our mailing list for a vivid exchange of thoughts all the time. We will urge the students to participate in all of them; especially on IRC can they directly talk to many nice and helpful team and community members. The mentors will introduce the students to the rest of the team (making sure everybody knows who the students are). There are people active in the IRC channel virtually 24/7, thanks to the international nature of the project.