Michal Čihař - Archive for 3/2014

As usual, I look at the application stats for phpMyAdmin just after student application period of Google Summer of Code is over.

First of all we got more proposals than in last years, this time there is way more students from India and discussions on mentors lists shows this is quite similar for other projects. Maybe it's just different timing which works better for students there, but there might be different reasons as well. There is also quite low number of spam or bogus proposals.

Same as in past years, people leave the submission to the last moment, even though we encourage them to submit early so that they can adjust the application based on our feedback.

Anyway we're just working on evaluation and will finalize it in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on April 21st.

Since introduction of Developer's Certificate of Origin in phpMyAdmin, we've struggled with automatically checking pull requests on GitHub that they match this.

First attempt was to integrate this check into Travis environment, but that proven to be hard to understand by potential contributors as it did not give direct feedback what went wrong. So it was still useful for us, but still we had to explain the situation. With recent flood of contributions from potential GSoC students, it became quite tedious task.

So let's automate that. GitHub has quite powerful API, so it should not be that hard. Looking at Webhooks documentation, it is quite easy to get hooked on pull request creation and updates and checking commits and adding comments is just a piece of cake. The hardest choice was choosing language in which to implement it :-). While not finding binding for GitHub in any of my favorite language packaged in Debian. I've decided to hack this quickly in PHP without using any library and if this turns out to be limitation in future, it can be easily rewritten.

First incarnation of our commit checker did check just Signed-Off-By lines in commit messages, but I've found that there might be some other useful checks. So the script got extended for various simple coding style violations, which we see quite often like wrong indentation or using DOS end of lines (the example of all fired checks can be found in pull request 1081). You can find the code for it in our scripts repository.

phpMyAdmin has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2014. So if you are a student and thinking about how to spend this summer, you might want to join us.

As usual, we have prepared dozen of ideas, so in case you are interested, it's really the time to start to work on your application. We require you to contribute before GSoC, so that we can see you can handle the code and our tools. All details you might need are available in our applicant guide.

Our requirements might sound strict, but without them, we would drown in hundredths of applications with no clue how to decide, so do your homework and prepare perfect application. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on mailing list and submit the application to to GSoC website.