Google Summer of Code and similar project guidelines

 Summer of Code is a project by Google in which students are paid to implement

 some nice new features for various participating open source projects ...
 

 This text is a collection of things to take care of for the next soc as
 it's a little late for this year's soc (2006).

 
 The Goal:
 Our goal in respect to soc is and must be of course exactly one thing and

 that is to improve FFmpeg, to reach this goal, code must

 * conform to the development policy and patch submission guidelines

 * must improve FFmpeg somehow (faster, smaller, "better",

   more codecs supported, fewer bugs, cleaner, ...)
 
 for mentors and other developers to help students to reach that goal it is

 essential that changes to their codebase are publicly visible, clean and

 easy reviewable that again leads us to:

 * use of a revision control system like git

 * separation of cosmetic from non-cosmetic changes (this is almost entirely

   ignored by mentors and students in soc 2006 which might lead to a surprise

   when the code will be reviewed at the end before a possible inclusion in

   FFmpeg, individual changes were generally not reviewable due to cosmetics).

 * frequent commits, so that comments can be provided early