GSoC:2006

XMMS2 has been accepted as a qualifying open source project in Google's Summer of Code 2006. To start off, please read Google's resources, including the student FAQ, which includes a timeline of the program.

Why work on XMMS2?

The XMMS2 project has been around since 2003 and has a rather extensive and stable code base by now. But there are still a lot of ideas to be implemented! We believe that XMMS has been the most popular player around free software world for a reason. As a participant in the XMMS2 Team you will be greeted by a tight, funny and creative group. You will help build the next de-facto standard within opensource audio playback.

Student Requirements

See Summer of Code 2006/Student_requirements

Deadlines

Current deadlines:

June 26th, 2006 (2006-06-26): Mid-term evaluation period starts (mentors)
July 1st, 2006 (2006-07-01): Mid-term evaluations due (mentors)

News

SoC blogs

Date: 26 May 2006 WST (2006-05-26)
Author: Sham Chukoury

Now that SoC2006 is really under way, students and mentors are chronicling their summer coding adventures on their blogs, and it's all being collected at Planet XMMS2! If you're an accepted XMMS2 SoC student and you have a blog, you might want to e-mail eleusis@xmms.org to be added to the planet.

Proposals trickling in

Date: 3 May 2006 WST (2006-05-03)
Author: Sham Chukoury

So, the floodgates have opened to student applications and XMMS2 has received a small handful of them so far. From what I've seen, it seems students aren't reading the Student Requirements section carefully: your proposal is exactly what it says it is - a proposal. Propose a task and detail it for us, don't simply say "I'd like to work on task X because I really really like you."

First of all, the tasks described in Proposed projects aren't very detailed - it's up to each individual applicant to set out how they'd like to go about doing the task. Secondly, the tasks in the list are mostly ideas - each student is free to propose 'blue sky' ideas which we haven't thought of. That said, bear in mind that, as far as the XMMS2 project goes, we'd like to focus mainly on the core (xmms2 daemon) and project infrastructure, rather than third party clients. Work on existing third party clients may be ineligible as they are projects run more or less independently of the XMMS2 project itself.

Don't panic! If you're having trouble figuring out a schedule for your proposal, or want clarifications on any proposed task, feel free to contact us. (Our mailing list is currently down, so talk to us on on IRC: #xmms2 on Freenode, or by contacting a mentor (e.g. eleusis@xmms.org)

Something else I noticed is that some students do little research on (or have poor knowledge of) XMMS2 before submitting their proposals. Please do take the time to do some research and read up on the project - you will find most of the useful information right here on this wiki. If you can't find something, or aren't clear about something in particular, like I said above, talk to us and we'll try to help you. :)

Finally, try to consider the proposal as a formal document - give it some semblance of a structure and make sure you include all the relevant details (see Student Requirements). Working on your proposal doesn't just tell us what you want to do for XMMS2, but the process could also help you see more clearly what you're getting into.

Good luck!

p.s. Maybe there's some confusion with the terms 'proposal' and 'proposed task'. A 'proposed task' is an idea or a task that the XMMS2 team put forward (proposed) as something a student could work on, to contribute to the project. A student's 'proposal' may be derived from a 'proposed task', but is a document where the student lays out in detail what he/she is prepared to contribute and how he/she is proposing to do it over the Summer of Code period. This doesn't mean that a student proposal has to be perfect the first time around - mentors are willing to talk to individual students in order to refine the proposals prior to final ranking.