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GSoC2013

2013 Application

Organization Name

LyX – The Document Processor

Description

LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG). LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference lists and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.

Home Page

http://www.lyx.org

Main Organization License

GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

Veteran/New

New

If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

2007 and 2011

Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Since its 2.0 release in April 2011, LyX has become an ever more popular solution for users who need to author and output typographically high quality documents. LyX uses the LaTeX typesetting engine to ensure all documents, from one page letters to hundreds of pages long books and reports, are beautifully typeset. As is the case with many open-source projects, however, LyX has limited developer manpower which focuses principally on maintaining a stable product rather than implementing new features. By participating in GSoC 2013, LyX hopes to attract young developers who would tackle long-requested and much-awaited features such as horizontal scrollbars or a layout editor, features that would significantly improve our users' experience. LyX is currently nearing its 2.1 major release, which will happen by the end of this year, and the new features developed during GSoC 2013 would constitute the base for our future 2.2 release.

What is the URL for your Ideas list?

http://wiki.lyx.org/Devel/SummerOfCode2013Ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

At #lyx-dev on Freenode

What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.

Most of this year's mentors are long-established developers, including the current maintainers of the stable and development branches. These developers have a thorough understanding of the LyX code base. We also have two more recent developers who will be co-mentoring specific projects, and act as backup mentors should the need arise.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Students will be asked to participate in discussions on the LyX development mailing list (at least weekly), so they can seek the input from the larger community on design and coding issues. Weekly follow-up by mentors by email. If unable to reach via email, by phone. If the mentors notice slow progress after the first month, we will institute a weekly IRC meeting. The students are also requested to submit the code they have written to a public repository, as regularly as possible, thus allowing the mentors to see the progress and comment on it.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Most of our mentors are established developers who have been actively involved in the project for the past few years. Should any of them become unavailable during the GSoC 2013, we also have 2 backup mentors who will be available to fill the void. In all cases, participating students will always receive guidance from core developers on the LyX development mailing list, even from developers who haven't volunteered for a mentor's position, or on our IRC channel.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?

The LyX community makes use of two very active mailing lists: the users list as well as the developers list. Once an interested student has contacted the project, she will be encouraged to subscribe to both lists as these are the primary means of communication for the project. While drafting the proposal, the student will be encouraged to go through a formal design process. She might make use of the users list to solicit opinions on the feature design and then seek the advice of the developers list as to how the new features might be implemented. During the program, the student will be encouraged to send regular updates, in addition to code patches, to the list (and not just to her mentor). The other students and mentors will be encouraged to review and comment on the patches, and in so doing, become acquainted with the wider developer community. We will also strongly encourage students to start a weekly blog reporting on their GSoC experiences and progress on their projects. If the students are not blogging already, we will help them set up a blogging site on public platforms (Blogger, Wordpress, etc, at students' discretion).

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

The LyX community prides itself on being friendly to new users and developers. Our hope is that being immersed in this collaborative and consensus-driven community will encourage students to develop an emotional attachment to the project. More specifically, though, towards the completion of a certain project we will attempt to interest the student with some other moderately difficult to implement feature requests (many of which are already discussed on our bug tracker).

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.

KDE - Jeff Mitchell and Lydia Pintscher, administrators for the KDE GSoC program are vouching for us

Categories: Development, GSoC, Misc