Summer of Code applicant with ambition!

[John Koelndorfer]

Hello wine-devel,

My name is John and I'm a computer science major at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. I've made quite a bit of use of Wine before
(and I have purchased Crossover) and I'm inspired to give something back to
the project.

I have fairly ambitious goals for myself (maybe too much so) so I wanted to
let you guys know who I am and what I'd like to do, then hopefully gain some
insight into whether or not what I am considering is reasonable. My
experience is roughly as follows:

* I am familiar with C. I'm not an expert developer by any stretch but I can
certainly get by. I have some knowledge of Git.
* I don't have any Windows development experience outside of some exposure
to .NET a long time ago.
* I have not submitted a patch to the Wine project. I hope to change this in
the near future. I've looked at a little bit of the source code.
* I have high standards for myself. Whether or not they are high enough to
meet Alexandre's expectations... perhaps time will tell. :-)
* I'm a really fast learner. Maybe this is my single most redeeming quality.

All that being said, my goal for the summer would be to really dig into the
D3D stuff, optimizing what is already completed and adding to what is not.
I'm a gamer myself, so I have an arsenal of programs with which to test (and
a Windows installation to compare to). Do you think this goal is reasonable?
If not, I could start somewhere smaller and work my way up. I'm certainly
open to suggestions.

Thanks!

John

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:34 PM, John Koelndorfer
 wrote:
> Hello wine-devel,
>
> My name is John and I'm a computer science major at the University of
> Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. I've made quite a bit of use of Wine before
> (and I have purchased Crossover) and I'm inspired to give something back to
> the project.
>
> I have fairly ambitious goals for myself (maybe too much so) so I wanted to
> let you guys know who I am and what I'd like to do, then hopefully gain some
> insight into whether or not what I am considering is reasonable. My
> experience is roughly as follows:
> - I am familiar with C. I'm not an expert developer by any stretch but I can
>
> certainly get by. I have some knowledge of Git.
> - I don't have any Windows development experience outside of some exposure
>
> to .NET a long time ago.
> - I have not submitted a patch to the Wine project. I hope to change this in
>
> the near future. I've looked at a little bit of the source code.
> - I have high standards for myself. Whether or not they are high enough to
>
> meet Alexandre's expectations... perhaps time will tell. :-)
> - I'm a really fast learner. Maybe this is my single most redeeming quality.
>
> All that being said, my goal for the summer would be to really dig into the
> D3D stuff, optimizing what is already completed and adding to what is not.
> I'm a gamer myself, so I have an arsenal of programs with which to test (and
> a Windows installation to compare to). Do you think this goal is reasonable?
> If not, I could start somewhere smaller and work my way up. I'm certainly
> open to suggestions.
>
> Thanks!
>
> John

First of all welcome to Wine. For a gsoc project I would try to work
on a somewhat isolated piece of code, so that your work won't break
daily and it is also easier to see what you are doing (and writing a
good project description might be easier for an isolated project as
well). Regarding the Direct3D code, it is quite complex and I don't
think it is well suited for a gsoc project (it has a really steep
learning curve). A project like 'optimizing Direct3D' is a bit vague
and this would also make it hard to see whether you met your goals or
not. Last year I would have said that if this area interests you, work
on the D3DX9 helper dlls. Right now we have most of the easy 'bits'
(though not all parts have been merged) and mainly lack the difficult
part namely the HLSL shader compiler, but it is not suited for a GSOC
project.

I would think about an area which you like to work on (or perhaps a
specific app which you really want to improve). Take into account that
GSOC is quite short and realize that getting code into Wine can also
take time because you might need multiple iterations of a patch and
you have to write a lot of unit tests. So try to pick something which
is realistic to improve in such an amount of time.

Good luck!
Roderick

[John Koelndorfer]

<snip quoted text>

Firstly, thanks to Roderick for the prompt reply. I had a feeling that
my ideas were a little much. :-)

That being said, I've again gone over the list of possible projects on
the Summer of Code page and one that particularly piqued my interest
was "Direct3D - Conformance / Performance / Interactive tests". This
seems like it may be a good fit given my lack of previous experience
in the Wine codebase. I haven't written any code for 3D-ish games but
I can't imagine that would be a huge setback. Maybe Dan Kegel or
someone else who has worked on D3D can comment here?

If that is not feasible, I think I would be a strong candidate for the
"Test Suite" project since my scripting-fu is fairly strong.

I've been looking through open Wine bugs but I've yet to find
something that fits with GSOC and my skill level. If there are any
suggestions for specific bugs to look into maybe I could build a
project around one.

Thanks!

John