[Buildbot-devel] Welcome to this year's GSoC students!

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

This year's GSoC student projects have been announced!

Srinu Palivela will be working on completing the master-side source
steps, with an eye toward finally removing support for the slave-side
implementations.  There are a few key pieces of functionality to
implement here, some of them quite substantial.  In fact, several VC's
are not implemented on the master side at all.  The end goal here is
to have no outstanding bugs in the master-side steps, and as a result
no excuse for anyone still using the slave-side implementations to
continue doing so.  Srinu will be working with Sam Kleinman and Ernie
Hershey as mentors.

Mayorov Michael will be working on implementing a new master-slave
protocol, based on AMP.  This new protocol opens lots of exciting
possibilities: buildslave implementations in something other than
Python, for embedded implementations; SSL or SSH authentication of
master/slave connections; tunneling; resiliency to connection
failures; and more.  But that's all built on a solid protocol, which
is what we're aiming to see implemented this summer.  This project
requires quite a bit of careful thinking about protocol design, and he
has already begun this process during the application period.  John
Carr and Jared Grubb will be mentoring.

Please give a warm welcome to our students, both here and on irc and Trac.

As an FYI, mentors are responsible for keeping students on-track and
helping them find resources.  They are not necessarily responsible for
technical advice.  That's up to all of us.

So: while I know we're all busy, please do take the time to answer
Srinu and Michael's questions, file and update bugs, and comment on
pull requests as expeditiously as possible.

Dustin