Re: Projects for the next Outreachy round

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

Hi Victoria,

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 7:18 PM Victoria Dye <vdye@github.com> wrote:
>
> Christian Couder wrote:
> > About the "More Sparse Index Integrations" Shuqi worked on, mentored
> > by Victoria, I am likely not the best person to mentor it, but I think
> > I could manage. It would be nice though if I got an idea about what
> > should be done next and how much work is left in general in this area.
> > (Shuqi's GSoC final report at
> > https://cheskaqiqi.github.io/2023/08/22/Final/ doesn't talk much about
> > this.) Perhaps even if Shuqi is continuing to work on the project,
> > there is still work that could be done in parallel on other commands
> > than the ones he is working on.
>
> To be honest, I'd recommend against using "More Sparse Index Integrations"
> as a project again - I was actually going to suggest "retiring" the project
> after this past GSoC term. The remaining commands are all fairly complex, to
> the point that they'd be challenging even for someone that's done a lot of
> sparse index work.

Ok, I will not propose that project then.

> All that said, if someone is *really* interested in this project, you might
> be able to get it to work. You'll probably want to limit the scope to one
> command and make sure there's a strong emphasis placed on testing. Sparse
> index integrations can introduce a lot of subtle bugs (e.g. the one Shuqi
> found in 'diff' [1]), and a buggy command is worse for users than lacking
> sparse index compatibility.
>
> I hope that helps!

Sure, thanks for the interesting update on this,
Christian.