[asterisk-dev] Google Summer of Code 2009

[Mark Michelson]

Russell Bryant wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> The Asterisk project participated in the Google Summer of Code program
> in 2005, but has not since then.  I would like to apply again this year.
>   I think it is an amazing opportunity to reach out to new developers
> and get some code written that we all want done, but have not had a
> chance to get to.
> 
> http://code.google.com/soc/
> 
> If we want to make this happen, we have a couple of things that we need
> to come up with as soon as possible.  Mentoring organizations must 
> complete their application for the program this week.
> 
> 1) We need to determine who is willing to serve as a mentor from the
> Asterisk project.  Mentors will be paired up with a student and will
> provide guidance to help the student bring their project to completion.
>   Without commitments from mentors, we can not participate in the program.
> 
> Obviously, an appropriate pairing of a mentor to a student is important.
>   It's acceptable to say, "I am willing to be a mentor, provided that it
> is for a student working on a project in my area of expertise."
> 
> If you think you would be interested, please let me know!  Feel free to 
> respond on this list, or to me directly.
> 
> 2) We must build a suggested project list.  When students apply for the
> program, they can submit a proposal for implementing one of our
> suggested projects, or another project of their choosing.  Projects for
> this list should be appropriate in scope for a college student not yet 
> familiar with the code base to implement in a Summer.
> 
> I'm going to create a file in svn to maintain our project ideas list:
> 
>   - svn/asterisk/trunk/doc/google-soc2009-ideas.txt
> 
> To kick of the list of ideas, here are a couple of high level thoughts:
> 
> a) I think we could break up the "PineMango" project into multiple
> suggested projects.
> 
> b) John Todd and others had some great ideas regarding security in
> Asterisk at the last developer conference that could be turned into
> suggested projects.
> 
> If you have some thoughts about other projects to add to the list, 
> again, please let me know, and I'll add them to our ideas list.
> 
> Thanks!
> 

Firstly, let me state that I would be willing to mentor a student depending on 
what area of the code they choose to work with. I can work with most areas in 
Asterisk. The areas I would *not* feel comfortable working in are channel 
drivers other than chan_sip. Any other place in Asterisk I either know well 
enough or could learn quickly enough to be able to mentor effectively.

As far as code project ideas go, here are some suggestions (listed roughly in 
order of preference):

* ast_storage: For those not in the know, this was an attempt to make several 
storage backends, primarily for use in app_voicemail but potentially useful for 
other purposes, too. I think this could make a decent project for a student 
because the code is already partially written, app_voicemail needs some major 
cleanup with regards to how it handles various storage destinations, and 
unfortunately, this just isn't something that is likely to get tackled by anyone 
else any time soon.

* manager2/managergames: These are existing branches designed to get manager 
events converted to internal Asterisk events. While I am suggesting this as a 
project, I would like to get Olle's approval first since such a project could 
encroach on his managergames ideas. This is another project that will be great 
and useful but is not likely to be worked on by others due to other projects 
they're working on.

* Transaction support for chan_sip. Pretty much self-explanatory. Would help get 
rid of several known bugs and would make the channel driver much more logical 
overall.

* Anything to help regarding automated testing of Asterisk. Perhaps some sort of 
addition to Matt Nicholson's asttest branch? I'm not really sure that this is 
really in the spirit of GSoC though.

Other potential places to browse for ideas are Olle's http://asteriskideas.org 
site and the voip-info wiki.

Mark Michelson