Subject: GSoC - Ubuntu and Mir participation

From: Thomas Voß <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:24:18 +0100

Hey all,

reposting a message from Dylan McCall regarding Ubuntu's GSoC
participation, please see a list of potential Mir topics at the end of
the mail:

We're going to be applying for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year.
I'm sure many of you know the drill at this stage: it's an opportunity
to grow Ubuntu's developer community, share knowledge with talented
university students, make friends and get some really cool work done. We
have a wiki page all about GSoC 2013 that explains the hows and whys in
detail:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2013

Since the last GSoC we participated in, Ubuntu has really found its own
with several projects led by Canonical and by members of the community.
As I see it, Unity, Juju, Ubuntu Touch and Mir are interesting projects
that students would enjoy contributing to, and they are all projects
that students would be best equipped to work on with Ubuntu as the
mentoring organization. And, of course, there are many more where those
came from! I already mentioned that there are many lovely benefits for
the students and for Ubuntu, and I'll also point out that this is a way
to really expand on the community-friendly nature of those projects. I
think it would be amazing if we could make that happen.

So, this is where you come in! Do you have an idea for a project that we
could empower a student to work on over the summer? Are you interested
in mentoring one of those talented and motivated students? Either way,
you're welcome to add what you see fit to our list of ideas and mentors:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2013/Ideas.

Thank you,
Dylan McCall

>From the top of my head, the following topics w.r.t. Mir might make good
candidates for GSoC:

 * Behavior driven testing: Pick up Robert Carr's work on Cucumber-based
testing approaches, enhance it and potentially make it reusable by Unity.
 * Integrate Mir with a performance-metrics collection system (either
Performance CoPilot or collectd) and capture a set of pre-defined
metrics for our CI and/or Autolanding scenarios.
 * Provide a Mir-backend for SDL (2.0).
 * Provide a Mir-backend for GTK 3.

What do you think? Makes sense? Any additions?

Thanks,

  Thomas

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From: Alan Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:24:17 +0000

> What do you think? Makes sense? Any additions?

We've a couple of low priority (for now) mir bugs listed around software
rendering and working in VMs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1118903
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1157196

Addressing this would widen the platforms supported by mir.

Also, it would likely be a larger piece of work, but how about Wayland
protocol support?

---

From: Christopher James Halse Rogers <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:01:01 +0011

> metrics for our CI and/or Autolanding scenarios.
These look to me like they'd be interesting, achievable, and sufficient 
work.

>  * Provide a Mir-backend for GTK 3.

I don't think these would be good candidates - they rely on core work 
not yet done, and once that core work is done I'm not sure they'll be 
enough work for a GSoC. I guess both together might be?

---

From: Robert Ancell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:57:47 +1300

> What do you think? Makes sense? Any additions?

Other ideas:
- Support for colour management
- Support for Wacom tablets

However, in saying this GSOC is a not insignificant amount of work to be
a mentor (in my and others experiences) and many projects do not provide
any useful output. So if we do GSOC work it's important to:
- Limit the number of projects we have running
- Only accept highly motivated and capable students

--Robert

---

From: Daniel van Vugt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:56:13 +0800

I've been tempted to think the same about a lot of things that need 
doing. But at this stage we probably have to be realistic and accept 
some things will need to be changed as the ground underneath them 
continues to move. It would be less productive to say people can't make 
significant contributions just because they might conflict with 
potential architectural changes in future.

P.S. Virtual machine support is not a low priority item. It might seems 
so right now, but to switch the whole Ubuntu desktop over to Mir, VM 
support is very important.

- Daniel