Re: GSoC applicant proposal, Uday PB

Greetings,

* Chapman Flack (chap(at)anastigmatix(dot)net) wrote:
> On 3/19/20 2:03 PM, Alexander Korotkov wrote:
> > Does your project imply any coding? AFAIR, GSoC doesn't allow pure
> > documentation projects.
>
> That's a good question. The idea as I proposed it is more of an
> infrastructure project, adjusting the toolchain that currently
> autogenerates the docs (along with some stylesheets/templates) so
> that a more usable web reference is generated from the existing
> documentation—and to make it capable of generating per-version
> subtrees, as the PostgreSQL manual does, rather than having the
> most recent release be the only online reference available.
>
> I was not envisioning it as a technical-writing project to improve
> the content of the documentation. That surely wouldn't hurt, but
> isn't what I had in mind here.
>
> I am open to withdrawing it and reposting as a Google Season of Docs
> project if that's what the community prefers, only in that case
> I wonder if it would end up attracting contributors who would be
> expecting to do some writing and copy-editing, and end up intimidated
> by the coding/infrastructure work required.

I appreciate that it might not be a great fit for GSoD either, but that
doesn't mean it fits as a GSoC project.

> So I'm not certain how it should be categorized, or whether GSoC
> rules should preclude it. Judgment call?

You could ask on the GSoC mentors list, but I feel pretty confident that
this doesn't meet the criteria to be a GSoC project, unfortunately. The
GSoC folks are pretty clear that GSoC is for writing OSS code, not for
pulling together tools with shell scripts, or for writing documentation
or for systems administration or for other things, even if those other
things are things that an OSS project needs.

Thanks,

Stephen