Xapian devel - Feb 2014 - Contributing to Xapian : GSoC 2014

Hi,

I am Ankesh Anand (*irc: ankesh11)*, an undergrad from Indian Institute of
Technology, Kharagpur. I am excited about Information Retrieval in general
and eager to contribute to Xapian as part of GSoC 2014.

I had a look at the list of projects Ideas and the Ranking projects on
Weighted Schemes and Learning to Rank seemed interesting to me. I did a
course on Information Retrieval at my university, along with a course
project which showed and  analyzed the Citation Networks given by search
queries over a million research papers from Microsoft Academic. I guess my
IR knowledge coupled with mathematical background would help in either of
these projects.
How should I go about contacting the respective mentors of these projects?
Is IRC fine?

Also, after having a look at the Hacking Guide in xapian-core, I was able
to build the Xapian repository from Git. I know want to move forward and
get acquainted with the Xapian codebase by contributing small patches. It
would be great if you guys can suggest me the next steps or point me to
some bug-fixes/issues which I might resolve to get familiar.

Thanks

-- 
Ankesh Anand
*Undergrad,Mathematics and Computing at*
*Indian Institue of Technology,Kharagpur*
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Hi Ankesh,

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 08:32:00AM +0530, Ankesh Anand
wrote:
> How should I go about contacting the respective mentors of these projects?
> Is IRC fine?
The potential mentors should all be reading this list, and they're on
IRC at least some of the time.  We don't really know at this point who
will end up mentoring what, and most of us should be able to give useful
advice on most areas of Xapian, so don't worry about finding the right
person to talk to - just ask and someone should answer.  If you ask on
IRC, bear in mind we probably aren't in the same timezone as you, so
you may need to stay around for an answer.
> Also, after having a look at the Hacking Guide in xapian-core, I was able
> to build the Xapian repository from Git. I know want to move forward and
> get acquainted with the Xapian codebase by contributing small patches. It
> would be great if you guys can suggest me the next steps or point me to
> some bug-fixes/issues which I might resolve to get familiar.
One good way to proceed is to pick a small first step in the project
you're thinking about (so for weighting schemes, you could try to add
support for another of the SMART normalisations to TfIdfWeight, or
profile one of the DfR schemes and see if you can speed it up).  This
should help you get you a better understanding of what the project
actually involves, and produce a more realistic plan for what you can
achieve in the time available.

Another option is we have a list of "bite size" ideas for things to
work on at:  http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProjectIdeas

Either way, if you have questions, just ask.

Cheers,
    Olly