Re: GSOC

[Werner LEMBERG]

Hello Greg, Anuj, and Priyesh!


Welcome to FreeType :-) We are glad that you are with us the next few
months (and maybe even longer), and thank you in advance for the work
on your projects.

Our main communication is e-mail, which has served us well since the
very beginning.  Except for really private messages I ask you to
always send e-mails to the 'address@hidden' mailing list,
so please subscribe in case you haven't done so.  While you have
personal mentors, it is rather that the collective wisdom of this list
that will guide you through your work.  In particular, you might get
an answer earlier because we are distributed all over the world,
living in different time zones.

We don't have an IRC channel, sorry.  Note also that most of us don't
have English as our mother tongue, which also means that we are more
comfortable with writing e-mails than talking directly.  For the
former, there is simply more time to formulate words correctly.

Don't be shy!  You should never hesitate to ask even simple things, if
necessary.  FreeType is a complex piece of software...

Now some technical details.

* Please get an account on Savannah

    https://savannah.nongnu.org/account/register.php

  and tell me your username so that I can give you write permission
  for the two FreeType git repositories.

* I ask you to put your stuff into a private branch called
  'xxx-projectname', with 'xxx' identifying yourself and 'projectname'
  your preferred project name).  If necessary, create more branches to
  your liking with similar names.

* After consolidation of your code (at the end of GSoC) a branch
  'GSoC-2020-xxx' should hold the final state of the contribution to
  which you can refer in your final report.

* If you think that your stuff doesn't belong to one of the two
  FreeType git repositories, feel free to create a repository
  elsewhere.

* Please get used to the (admittedly strange) code formatting rules of
  FreeType, for which we unfortunately don't have an automatic
  formatter.  Having a uniform appearance of code makes it much
  simpler to follow the logic.  On the other hand, don't worry too
  much about formatting details; I'll fix minor issues by myself.

  Of course, this only holds for C (or C++) code that should
  eventually get merged.

* I strongly advise you to learn how to write ChangeLog entries as
  used in FreeType.  This is not necessary for your private stuff, but
  the final 'GSoC-2020-xxx' branch should follow it.  To avoid merging
  issues, however, I ask you to actually *not* add stuff to the
  `ChangeLog` file itself.  Instead, you should format commit messages
  as if they were ChangeLog entries.

  Doing so needs a good amount of self-discipline.  Note that I often
  spend more time in writing a good ChangeLog entry than writing the
  code, and sometimes I even find problems with my code while doing
  so :-) As usual, it is more important to document *why* you do the
  change than describing the change itself – well-written code should
  tell you that automatically.  I also ask you to add comments to the
  source code for non-trivial things.


    Werner


PS: Anuj and Priyesh, please send your names written in your native
scripts :-)