Summer of Code Hosting

Every year, Google hosts their Summer of Code, a Summer-long event that helps students to get involved with open source projects. Students propose a contribution to a project and the projects decide which students to accept. The projects benefit from having new contributors and the contributors benefit by being more active in open source and receiving paychecks from Google for their efforts.

This year, Review Board has decided to help with the process by providing free hosting for Summer of Code-related review requests. We're offering to add up to 30 projects to gsoc.review-board.org in order to aid students and mentors in code review and submission. As we get a feel for the load, we may open this up for more projects later.

This is intended for Summer of Code-related submissions only. While we would love to provide free hosting to whole projects in general, we can't yet afford to do so. It's our hope that Review Board will prove useful to your project, encouraging your project to set up a dedicated server for future submissions.

What You'll Get

• Free hosting for all Summer of Code-related submissions for your project.
• A powerful yet easy to use diff viewer that allows inline commenting, making reviewing code a piece of cake.
• Interdiffs, making it easy to review large changes that have undergone many revisions.
• Status reports, listing the student's activity over a period of time.
• A complete history of all of your students' changes. Every revision of every diff.

Applying for Free Hosting

To join, simply send an e-mail to gsoc-request@review-board.org with the following information:

• Project name
• Website
• Short description of the project
• Source code repository information
• Type (SVN, CVS...)
• Repository path
• Mailing list for review request and review e-mails (optional).
• Bug tracker URL
• Number of students you're expecting
• A link to the Summer of Code listings for any students or mentors involved.

We'll respond to your request within the day and get things set up.

There's a reviewboard-gsoc mailing list for discussion and announcements. We strongly encourage all students and mentors to sign up to this. We expect it will be fairly low-traffic.

What's the Catch?

There's no catch. We're doing this with the hope of spreading Review Board in the open source community and making it a better product. We hope your project finds Review Board useful and will decide to set up a dedicated installation down the road.

Code review is something most open source projects do at some level, but there aren't many good tools out there to help. We believe making code review easier and more fun through Review Board can lead to better applications.

Getting Students Ready

Students and mentors wanting to use Review Board should download post-review, put it somewhere in their path and make it executable. To configure it with the Summer of Code Review Board server, put the following in $HOME/.reviewboardrc:

REVIEWBOARD_URL = "http://gsoc.review-board.org/"

You'll want to read the post-review documentation. There's additional general documentation available as well. In particular, the User Basics is a good read.

Reporting Problems

While things should generally run smoothly, it is possible that there will be issues. If you do have a problem with the servers or anything related to Summer of Code and Review Board, you can post to the reviewboard-gsoc mailing list.

If you have general Review Board questions, would like help setting up your own installation, or want to contribute back to the project, you can join the Review Board mailing list and post there.