The number of slots allocated to Boost has been declining each year. From
2006 to 2009 we had 9, 9, 8, and 7 slots to fund students. This is not a particularly good trend, but that number seems to depend on the number and quality of ideas and the availability of mentors.
... add to that the success rate of previous years?
Every year, I think we have 2 projects drop out.
Accurate observation. The SoC is not very long at all and if it takes a student a week or two to get up to speed with Boost.Test, SVN and Boost.Build, that is a big chunk of time lost right at the start of the project. Students also tend to do crazy things like go away on holiday or have relatives come to stay, so the projects really need to be tight if they are going to succeed.
I think it would help if there was a rule about having to commit something to svn each week. Students may be tentative about publicly displaying incomplete code but it's almost impossible to gauge how things are going otherwise.
I think that's a minimum requirement... If a student isn't committing then its a lot harder to measure progress. Besides, building these libraries isn't a one-time process. I think we can all agree on that ;) Other organizations also require their students to blog about their activities on a weekly basis. Having them update a changelog, rationale, or design notes as part of their documentary requirements might be a good idea for students leery of blogging.
If students were encouraged to write tests at the start of the SoC with their mentor, they would have a specific set of goals to work to. Mentors should be well placed to help the students define the precise requirements of the project. The path to acceptance from there is: get all the tests passing and document how the library does it. Even if this doesn't happen by the end of the SoC, there is still a definite goal.
I was thinking along the same lines. Although as Jake points out, that's not always easy.
Just chiming in with a brief status update of the CGI library: it is in working order and the interface is largely stable now.
I wish there was a more stable place document this work. I think there are a lot of interesting projects in the SOC repo and in the sandbox in general. Maybe we need a new site: Boost Labs (like Qt Labs) or something similar. On a side note, I wrote a small math-based webapp using the CGI library a year or two ago. It's a nice piece of work. Does it have anything a student could work on? Andrew Sutton andrew.n.sutton@gmail.com