Debian at the Google Code-in 2010-11

As you might know, Debian was one of the 20 organizations selected to participate in the first Google Code-in.

We got a moderate success since we started preparing the contest very late (I joined as mentor/admin the very first day of the contest!). Because of this, unlike other organizations, we did not manage to engage interested students from the very beginning of the Code-in. Since we did not have too many Debian tasks the first days, we did not attract many students, and thus did not have very many throughout the contest.

Given Debian tasks were mostly about improving and contributing to Debian, it was quite hard having tasks that did not require having a Debian installation and that made it difficult for many students to get involved. Also, until the last two weeks we did not have any translation task that could have attracted earlier students without too much confidence in their technical and English skills.

Nonetheless, Debian got 39 tasks done:

• 9 'write manpages' tasks, resulting in \~35 manpages submitted to the BTS
• 14 'triage bugs' tasks, resulting in 42 bugs triaged in the BTS
• 4 new packages created
• 1 QA upload
• 1 video showing Squeeze's artwork
• http://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging got translated into Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. And http://wiki.debian.org/UsingGit got translated into Italian.
• elinks got some nice icons
• dpkg got a small enhacement and a manpage for deb-src-control
• an initial draft of how to create a BOINC project with Debian
• and update-notifier-kde got a reboot option.

With about 30 students participating and at least one of the students has keep contributing to Debian after the contest!

The contest was sometimes stressful with several students wanting their tasks to be reviewed at the same time, and the date was problematic due to the winter (or summer!) holidays but still I am quite happy with the final result :D

Debian will be also participating again this year in the Google Summer of Code 2011. Join the soc-coordination mailing list and stay tunned if you want to participate as mentor or student.