Drawbacks of CLI GUI experimentations and GSoC/D mentoring (was: GSoC project idea)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Dashamir,

Am Mittwoch 20 März 2019 16:17:37 schrieb Dashamir Hoxha:
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 12:53 PM Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de>
> > The main problems I see with the idea:
> > a) How long and by whom would this wrapper be maintained?

> I think that experimentation is worthy too. A wrapper might be easier and
> more flexible if we want to experiment just to get a better feeling about
> the new interface. 

asking the question in isolation I'll personally think a wrapper is better for 
experimentation. And yes, there is value in experimentation. However 
experimenting with something that is unlikely so be ever stable or 
recommendable (because of the unlikeliness of upstream adoption and missing 
long term maintenance perspective) should be very clear to all participants.
To me there is only a small chance that this experiment will lead to useful 
knowledge. There maybe some knowledge gain, but without good chance to get an 
implementation done that actually helps users.

Note that this is just my perspective I don't know how the main GnuPG devs 
think about this.

> By the way, Google Season of Docs is around the corner:
> https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/
> Maybe this can be a good opportunity to improve the docs (about WKD etc.)
> The best part of GSoD is that it is not limited to the students, so
> hopefully the quality of the resulting work will be better.

Given that it is quite hard to write good documentation, it is almost like 
software engineering, I'll expect the same problems as with GSoC.

> > so to me it is doubtful that a student can handle this in 3 months.

> That's why the mentors are needed. 

The time a well qualified mentor may need to help a student produce a usable 
result can be higher than the time that she would need to implement or write 
the result by herselfs. So Werner could possibly implement what two students 
can do in the time he would need to teach and afterwards correct one students 
work. The justification for this mentor would be to either learn something 
themselfs or to hope that a student sticks around and repays the investment.
Both is not the best path. If you want to learn something else than teaching 
you could again implement this yourself and if we want to find new 
developers, we should seek for people that have a long term interest.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

-- 
www.intevation.de/~bernhard   +49 541 33 508 3-3
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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