Google is organizing
Summer of Code again this year, and
The Fedora Project is again participating as a mentor organization. However the problem is that they do not deserve to be chosen as one. Simply because they do not have mentors who can dedicate sufficient time for it, and the project administrator,
Patrick Barnes, is either crazy or incompetent.
Before I go any further, let me tell you that I am going to be extremely mordant in my criticism here. If you have any problems, then please note that I do not give a damn as to who you are and what you think. Just get lost.
The story revolves around two of my Summer of Code proposals-- one for GNU Parted (
http://glug-nith.org/~rishi/download/soc/soc-proposal-parted) and the other for Fedora (
http://glug-nith.org/~rishi/download/soc/soc-proposal-fedora-offline).
From the discussions going on in the
summer-of-code@gnu.org mailing list I could see that an application for Parted, whose title was very similar to mine, had made it to the
final list list of 8 applications chosen by the GNU Project's GSoC co-administrator Karl Berry. However since they never took my name, and my supposed mentor, David Cantrell, never mentioned anything on the list (he did criticise the FSF for not giving the $500 to the mentor without considering that it was Google who decided to give it to the FSF) nor posted a public comment, as opposed to the other mentors who were actively backing and debating the pros and cons of their students, there was no way I could know. Ofcourse I could have asked some GNU mentor, but I did not do that. If the web application did not permit a student to know the rankings, then so be it.
At the same time there was complete silence from Fedora. No traffic on the fedora-mentors mailing list, no one seemed to know how many slots it had bagged, no reply to my repeated requests for comment (one of them is
this) on the various mailing lists, apart from a conversation on #fedora-unity where people termed my proposal to be too trivial to be accepted. So I was all set to give up hope on this front, had it not been for Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay and Runa Bhattacharjee who somehow saw some sense in the proposal.
The April 11 deadline was coming nearer, and I was becoming increasingly sad to see Rakesh's proposal for
GNOWSYS getting stuck at the 9th position for GNU Project. GNU Project had 8 slots and his only chance was if some higher ranked application got cancelled due to a conflict. One of the GNOWSYS mentors confirmed to Rakesh that the Parted application which had been chosen was indeed mine. That is when I poked Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, a Fedora mentor, about the status of my proposal. If by some miracle I got accepted in Fedora, then my slot in GNU could be taken by Rakesh.
I was not prepared for the serious of surprises and shocks that ensued.
First of all not only did I have a chance, my application was one of the top 6 in Fedora and was almost sure of making it. The strangest part is that the GNU folks had no idea about this impending conflict. I had seen the GNU mentors sort out conflicts with other organizations (eg., Subversion & GCC) on their list, but why did not anyone know about this clash with Fedora? Even more strange because David Cantrell, my mentor for GNU Parted, is also an employee at Red Hat, and most of the Fedora mentors are his colleagues.
After a couple of frantic phone calls to Dr. Nagarjuna G., Rakesh's mentor for GNOWSYS, and an IRC conversation with Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay I decided to let the GNU and Fedora people know about this impending collision.
Here is the one I sent to GNU, and
here is the one I sent to Fedora. Obviously this was something the mentors and project administrators were supposed to do, since the student had no legitimate way of looking at the rankings till the final results were announced. But what can you do when a deserving candidate who is your good friend stands to lose due to the gross incompetence of others?
All seemed set for me to join Fedora, and Rakesh to get into GNU, but his was the suprise part. The shock was yet to come.
Suddenly Patrick Barnes and David Cantrell pinged me on #fedora-mentors. David is pissed off as if I had betrayed him by not telling him about my Pirut application before. In fact he thought I had wasted his time, and such things. What the hell? How was I supposed to know about the conflict if Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay had not broken the rules to reveal a vague idea of my status? Being a Red Hat employee is David not in the ideal position to know these things? Are not the mentors supposed to resolve the conflicts? And talking about David's time being wasted, he had not even officially intimated the GNU admins about his willingness to mentor me for Parted. It was only after James Youngman (a GNU co-administrator), followed by me, poked him that he did so. I have already talked about the lack of anything relevant from David that was visible to me. So where from does he get the right to be pissed off? Am I not the one who should be pissed off?
At the same time, Patrick announces Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay as my mentor. Patrick claims to be fully aware of the clash with GNU and says that if I had not mailed them (remember the circumstances leading to the mail were quite coincidental) they would have quietly let go of my Fedora proposal. What the hell? Are they not supposed to discuss this clearly and openly? What do they mean by silently letting the application slip off? Could they not have atleast asked me? So should not David be pissed off with Patrick and not me? Or is it too difficult for him to confront his co-developer on the Fedora Project?
Patrick went on to advice me to talk to Jeremy Katz about my proposal. Why the hell should I do that 36 hours before the results are to appear, when he never replied to my repeated mails so many days back? What is left to discuss with him? Or why would I even do so, even if he is the Pirut maintainer? Apparently Jeremy is very busy and can not read the fedora-devel-list in its entirety, and does not read fedora-mentors-list at all. No wonder Pirut sucks so badly.
But why is a student supposed to know all these details? There was not a single public comment or mail from the Fedora mentors in this regard till date. Now that I go out of my to make their life easier, they start asking me to talk to all sorts of people. Why could not they ask me to do this earlier? Were they blind, or were busy shoving their noses into the shithole? I have never seen such a situation in GNU, except David Cantrell, but then he is again more inclined towards Red Hat and Fedora than GNU.
The craziest part is that both Patrick and David fail to appreciate my efforts to resolve the conflict on my own initiative, something which they as mentors were supposed to do. In contrast there has been no such vindictiveness on the part of Karl Berry or James Youngman.
So is The Fedora Project really interested in Google Summer of Code 2007? Is The Fedora Project really keen to attracting new developers from the community? Should Patrick W. Barnes be allowed to be the administrator for next year's Summer of Code?
My answer to these three questions is a resounding no.
