Hi,
Congratulations on being accepted as a Summer of Code student with Rockbox this year.
We hope that you will enjoy your summer working on Rockbox, but for both our benefits, we want to establish the ground rules early, and explain what we expect you to achieve and how we expect you to achieve it. Failure to do this will result in you failing either the mid-term or final evaluation, and not receiving payment from Google. However, we hope this won't be an issue and will warn you if we feel you are not progressing as well as we think you should.
I'll be your mentor for the summer, which means that I'll be completing both your mid-term and final evaluations with Google. I will also be trying to pay close attention to your project, and helping with any technical issues. However, like most Rockbox contributors, I have an unrelated full-time job so may not always be around or able to give you an immediate reply.
For this reason, as well as to ensure that such discussions are publicly logged for future reference, we should avoid having private technical conversations, but instead carry them out in the usual public Rockbox channels - #rockbox on IRC, or the rockbox-dev mailing list. Having discussions there is also a nice way to keep other people informed on your progress. Feel free to participate in technical and support discussions, even if they are not specifically about your project.
So, if you are not already, you would be expected to subscribe to the rockbox-dev mailing list (choose "individual emails", so you can easily participate in discussions) and spend as much time as you can logged into #rockbox. These are the places where all Rockbox development is discussed, and it's important for you to be aware of the work of other developers, not just your own.
In addition to me, XXXXX XXXXX is your "backup mentor" (I have CC'd him in this email). He will also be following your process, and will be able to take over the role of mentor if for any reason I am temporarily unavailable or can't continue. If you need to contact me privately (i.e. for something non-technical), you should CC XXXXXX so he is aware of any issues and can help you if I am unable to.
We also require you to set up a page on the Rockbox wiki for your SoC project, and keep that up to date with documentation about your project and your progress. If somebody is wondering how you are progressing, that wiki page should provide them with the answer.
You should add your project plan and milestones to this wiki page and (after we've agreed on the contents), this will form the basis for your mid-term and final evaluations.
Finally, we want all our SoC students to have access to the main Rockbox subversion (SVN) repository, and as far as possible to commit their work directly there. However, you won't be granted access immediately, and will need to "earn" access in the same way as any other new developer. This is done by posting commit-quality patches to the Flyspray patch tracker and having them committed by an existing developer (most likely me, your mentor). After you've reassured us that you can code to the required guidelines and quality, and are not going to break things with your commits, then you'll be offered direct write access yourself.
Hope to see you soon in #rockbox!
Regards,
Dave.