GSoC organization application opened; I'd like to apply for GnuCash

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Geert,

I believe you would be a very good mentor. I was planning to ask you directly 
for this, but you volunteering is even better :-)

Am Freitag, 4. März 2011 schrieben Sie:
> I have never participated in a GSOC event, so I have no idea how much time
> it would cost me if I would take up a mentoring role. I would like to try
> though, so you can write me up as a volunteering mentor. I will be less
> available during the month of July, so someone may have to back me up
> during that month.

That shouldn't be a problem - I can be the backup mentor in that case.

This summer, I'm reducing my normal job work due to parental leave to a 50% 
job, even though this newly gained "free" time is already allocated to 
building our own house and/or looking after the kids... but additionally, some 
extra gnucash time will probably be possible.

> As for ideas, I myself am mostly focussed on the business features and
> would love to see some closer integration of those in the whole of
> GnuCash. Perhaps that can be more finetuned to fit into a GSOC project.

Yes. The GSoC proposals don't need to be very specific (read the manual 
there). I think the more important part for the GSoC proposals is that the 
projects 1. sound exiting enough so that good students will apply, and 2. 
should promise to reach some sort of achievement (i.e. the first small part of 
a usable feature) very early in the student's learning curve. 

In that sense, business improvements or rather: "New features for a specific 
business use case" are surely a good proposal.

> Another idea that might be worth implementing is bringing some sanity in
> the windows build system. I have several thoughts on how it could get more
> attractive but I'll skip that for a future mail. I'm not sure if I would
> want to mentor such a project though... (I don't use Windows for my daily
> computer use, so I lack a lot of knowledge on that platform).

Hm... I think this one isn't very well suited to a GSoC project. The challenge 
is that the students usually have very little experience in this sort of 
programming. Hence, our projects should enable them to reach a very first step 
of the overall task rather early during the 12 weeks. With the windows build, 
you rather need an experienced windows build guy, which we won't find as a 
student. But there will surely be plenty of other proposals. The uservoice 
forum is currently a very good selection of potential tasks.

Regards,

Christian