Re: GSoC Questions

[Djihed Afifi <djihedlists at googlemail dot com>]

Salam Mohammed Gamal, Everyone.


I know that this is a somewhat late reply. But we weren't picked up by
GSoC anyway. The projects are of course still offered for anyone who
might be willing to take them. Here are some clarifications:

في ث، 13-03-2007 عند 10:54 +0000 ، كتب Mohammed Gamal:
> Salamz Everyone,
> I am intending to join Google Summer of Code this year, and of course one of
> the projects I'd be really interested in getting involved with is Arabeyes.
> I am particularly interested in Siragi, libarabic, ITL, and BiCon. However,
> I've got some questions regarding these projects:
> 
> - Siragi:
>   This is one big project, and I didn't see any clear ideas about how it should
> be involved in GSoC. In other words, how should I -as a student- get involved
> with the project? What does it need? and what does it miss that can be
> implemented within GSoC's three-month time frame?

Gamal, ping Tarik Fdil and Nadim Shaikli and they should know best. We
are actually trying to engage in it this Month. A could idea is to watch
developer@ and/or pop at #arabeyes at irc.freenode.org, we generally
hang out there.

> 
> - libarabic:
>   I would be interested in working on normalization in libarabic, despite of my
> humble knowledge on that matter and on i18n in general - I am willing to learn
> though ;). But how should we deal with the absence of a standard on
> normalization, should we get over this and present our very own implementation?
> 

Pretty much yes. The project should be flexible enough to allow
normalisation rules to be changes. 
This is actually a very good project for anyone willing.

> - ITL
>   I've seen in the wiki that ITL needs to be ported to other languages. I like
> this idea very much as it suits GSoC ideally. It doesn't seem so hard and is
> doable within 3 months. But I have a few stupid questions here:
>  * What is exactly meant by porting? Should the whole code be ported to other
> languages, or should we simply implement bindings to them?
>  * Should the student port to more than one language, or is one language enough
> ? (For myself, I would like to do that with Java and/or PHP)
> 

As you said there are two camps. I generally prefer "bindings", there is
no reason to reinvent the wheel and risk introducing bugs and getting
detached from the main source base. 
Implmeneting bindings is really easy, hence the suggestions for multiple
projects. This is GREAT for anyone willing to learn many languages!

Bicon, I don't know much about it :(

Mohammed, let me know whenever you have any mroe questions, if you are
willing to engage in any of these projects (as a volunteer of
course :) ) I'd be willing to share the load and help in anyway I can.

That applies to anyone else!

ArabeyesTodo page updated:
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/ArabeyesTodo

Djihed