Re: [recommenders-dev] Snipmatch

[Andreas Sewe <andreas.sewe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kartik,

> Thanks for your reply. We actually do not wish to participate in GSoC
> and we do not need an evaluation letter either. But we would certainly
> be glad to have a mentor to work under.

we committers can certainly provide you with feedback on your work. Olav
Lenz, Johannes Dorn, and myself would probably be the ones who are most
involved in Snipmatch and who can help you further.

> What we are planning to do is re-design the tool (Snipmatch) so as to
> make it more extensible. We were looking into the code a few days back
> and realized that the code is not easily extensible and lack of
> documentation is going to make it more difficult to add features to it.
> So we thought instead of making changes to the current code we would
> like to come up with a new design that is easily extensible and provides
> many more features. As the existing code base is not so huge we think
> re-implementing the tool is going to be as time consuming as
> understanding the code and extending it.

Honestly, re-implementing something is a huge amount of work, not only
in terms of lines of code, but also in terms of secondary things like
tests, documentation, and changes to third-party plugins (we at
Codetrails have one, for example). Also, any single, large change is
less likely to be merged in a timely fashion and requires lots of legal
paperwork with the Eclipse Foundation.

So I would rather work within the current framework, identify the points
where an extension mechanism is needed, and then contribute small,
well-tested changes.

The two main areas where an extension mechanism is needed is 1) the
support for diverse implementations of ISnippetRepisitory and 2) the
ability to use different text editors for the snippets (which are
written in JFace Template language). A student is working on a
Xtext-based editor, but until that is feature-complete it would be nice
to have a simple plain-text editor as fallback.

> We will be doing this as a part of our Software Engineering Lab. But we
> would like to contribute the outcome to the Code Recommender's
> Community. We have already proposed the project (I am attaching the
> project proposal with the mail) and got it approved. What we wanted to
> know is if this is going to be helpful to the Code Recommender's Community.

Yes, certainly. But as I said, working with the existing process is much
more likely to get your code merged into the master branch.

> We are aware of the fact that this has been put up as a GSoC project and
> hence you may be concerned about the fact that if we and some other
> student (through GSoC) takes it up simultaneously then we may end up
> doing the same thing twice. But as we would be done with our work by the
> end of April and GSoC starts only at the start of May the other student
> can continue with the code that we would have written by then.

Well, that risk exists. At least Olav is already working on Snipmatch
right now, to get himself acquainted with the codebase. He's currently
re-thinking the way queries are handled by the ISnippetRepository, as
not every ISnippetRepository implementation may use a Lucene-based
index, so passing Lucence-syntax query strings around is a bit more
coupling than necessary.

Maybe you can discuss things with Olav.

> This is
> our first experience in a professional environment but we are very
> enthusiastic about the project and will definitely try our best.

I certainly encourage you to do your contributions through Gerrit; that
way, you will get code reviews from us.

Hope that helps.

Andreas

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