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Google Summer of Code 2015 Ideas Page

GNU Mailman is hoping to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015 and this page consists of some of the project ideas and guidelines on how to participate.

Skills Required

These skills are appreciated but their absence in no way disqualifies anyone from participating. Specific projects may have their desired skills listed along with them.

  • Intermediate Python programming (for instance, you can write list comprehensions, classes, subclasses, and generators, and you at least sometimes use virtual environments, even if you are not yet comfortable making your own decorators)
  • Familiarity with any version control (Mailman core and Postorius uses bzr, Hyperkitty ues git) (note: this may change for MM core by GSoC if Launchpad gains git support.)
  • Ability to setup your own development environment for Mailman

Note: You can use a vcs of your own choice for playing around, but we accept merge requests only through Launchpad (which uses bzr) for Mailman core and Postorius. However we are planning to switch to git very soon.

We encourage you to discuss your doubts with us so that we can help you get up to speed. But the more you are able to demonstrate ability in advance, the more likely we are to choose your application!

Getting Started

Here are some useful links to get you started with Mailman Development.

Mailman is written in Python. Mailman 3 core is compliant only with python3.4 and the rest of the projects work on python2 (2.7+).You are not required to use a virtual machine for Mailman development, although many people prefer to do so.

Development work on Mailman 2.1 has been frozen for some time, so all new project ideas should be related to Mailman 3.

All of the above listed projects are a part of Mailman Project. Your proposal may involve any one of them or a combination of more than one.

Want to get involved?

If you're interested in participating in GSoC 2015 as a student, mentor, or interested community member, you should join the Mailman Developers mailing list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers and post any questions, comments, etc. to mailman-developers@python.org. But we want you to go through the resources mentioned above before asking questions, most of the times the answer is in there somewhere. Developers would be more enthusiastic to help you if you yourself have done some ground work.

In addition you may be able to find us on IRC at #mailman on irc.freenode.org.  If no one is available to answer your question, please be patient and post it to the mailing list as well.  (We *are* the developers for Mailman -- unsurprisingly, most of us prefer to communicate via email.)

Mailman has in the past participated under the Python Software Foundation's umbrella, and will again this year.  The PSF has some additional information (including other IRC channels and mailing lists) here: https://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2015

Project Ideas

We're still discussing possible ideas for 2015, and they'll appear here as we sort them out.  If you have another idea you'd like to propose (either as a prospective student, mentor, or interested community member), please send it to mailman-developers@python.org for discussion!  You can also look at older idea lists linked from the Development Home page (Sprints section, near the bottom), but do be careful – many of those ideas are now irrelevant, were rejected, or (yay!) have been implemented.

This is a tentative list and not certain!

  • Make mailman core able to localise digests and other mass mails for individual subscribers if administrators turn on full personalization
  • Add new skins/themes to HyperKitty and/or Postorius (see HyperKitty bug 83 and Postorius bug 1196608)

  • Add GitHub API integration (to automatically mail a Mailman list when a repo gets a new GitHub pull request)

  • User profile pages in HyperKitty and Postorius (see HyperKitty bug 74 and Postorius bug 1104497)

  • Write a Mailman API client library in another language (e.g., Go, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby)

  • Gather and surface administrative statistics in Mailman & Postorius, such as number of posts sent, # bounced, # of domains accessed, which lists are quiet and which are busy (see bug 1414169)

  • Rip out or redesign the topic system (see bug 975705)

Mentor List

The following folks are mentors and administrators for Mailman's 2015 Google Summer of Code effort.  Most mentors, even if they list addresses here, probably prefer that you post to Mailman Developers <mailman-developers@python.org> instead of sending private mail.  That gives you the broadest exposure to all mentors (improves chance of selection, we are not going to get a slot per mentor!), and probably somebody can respond to you relatively quickly if the "obvious suspect" doesn't.

  • Abhilash Raj <raj DOT abhilash1 NO AT HARVEST gmail DOT com> (maxking on #mailman)

  • Barry Warsaw <barry NO AT HARVEST list DOT org> (barry on #mailman) - MM core co-mentor

  • Florian Fuchs <flo DOT fuchs NO AT HARVEST gmail DOT com> (Mailman suborg admin, nick: florianf on freenode)

  • Aurelien Bompard <aurelien NO AT HARVEST bompard DOT org> (abompard on #mailman)