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Journal for December 2007

GHOP Help Needed

Thu, 2007-12-20 03:33 — Michael

The Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest has been running for a couple of weeks now, and the Mono Project has seen a fair bit of action. Sadly we've only had five completed tasks, with a couple more almost done. On a lot of the claimed tasks, many of the students and mentors have been slow to act, busy with real life work. I think that the timescale of the tasks makes things difficult. It's not easy to think up a task that an inexperienced student can complete within five days, especially considering that they often need to get up to speed with the technologies before starting, and need to fit it in around schoolwork. Hopefully now that the Christmas holidays are beginning, students will have a lot more time to spend on the GHOP!

I apologise to any student who's been held up from starting further tasks because of delays in reviewing and closing the tasks. Doing a proper job takes quite a bit of time, and the Mono team has a lot of other important things to do too, like getting the shiny new Mono 1.2.6 and MonoDevelop 1.0 Beta 3 releases ready.

I'd like to put out a general request to everyone and anyone in the Mono community, or working with Mono-based apps, to lend a hand for the GHOP. You can submit proposals for tasks on the Mono GHOP issue tracker, and critique students' work. It doesn't matter if you can't write code — help with docs or icons. Go out and send students our way. This has the potential to be a huge community event. You can find us hanging out on #mono-ghop as well as the usual IRC channels on GIMPNet IRC.

MonoDevelop in the GHOP

Wed, 2007-12-19 06:25 — Michael

So far, all five completed tasks for the Mono GHOP have been MonoDevelop -related. I'm really pleased with the amount of interest we've had so far. I'd like to thank our hard-working students and mentors, and the wonderful people at Google's Open-Source Program Office who put this contest together.

  • Dan Abramov submitted a very cleanly-written addin to integrate the Smokey code analysis tool . I'll be using this to tidy up minor bugs in the MonoDevelop codebase, and hopefully we can ship it in the addin repository after the 1.0 release.
  • This was followed by some fantastic icons from Vinicius Depizzol ("videpizzol"), and these will certainly be in the 1.0 release. They're not yet in SVN due to my pending review of our icon usage and handling in MonoDevelop.
  • The completed Brazilian Portuguese translation by Renato Felipe Atilio ("renatoat") is now our most up-to-date first translation, though due to changes to our translation infrastructure it's not merged into SVN yet.
  • The latest addition to our still-meagre documentation comes from "entereczek", a Tutorial for C/C++ Projects. I've put it on the MonoDevelop wiki.
  • Although not strictly a MonoDevelop contribution, "dwashing" created a MonoDevelop solution for F-Spot that's been committed to SVN.

Please continue to suggest, claim and review tasks. We still have plenty left on the issue tracker over at Google Code.Pop over to #mono-ghop on GIMPNet IRC to discuss things or to hang out with us.