GSOC, tests, mbox-to-maildir.

[Tobia Tesan]

Hello everybody!
I'm new here.
I'm a twentysomething CompSci freshman (yes, I started out late from
Italy and a Firefox/Thunderbird user.

I was thinking of applying for Summer Of Code this year and I'm having a
look at a number of participating projects.

I noticed that Mozilla is participating and I'm wondering if there's a
way I could apply for such a prestigious and "important" projects.

The big, fat disclaimer: I have real world programming experience with
small and medium projects and I'm a reasonably good student (my grades
are around 95/100 - or, roughly, I'm in the top 5%), but I have never
hacked Mozilla.

I read the proposed ideas, but I'm not sure if they are doable without
previous experience with the codebase - especially, such a /huge/ codebase.

Should I give it a try anyway?

I'm especially attracted to the ideas listed on the GSOC page under
"Automation and Tools" and "Thunderbird Tests", simply because I love
tests (there may or may not be a correlation with the fact that I'm a
nitpicking bastard).

However, my "dream job" would be working on the Mailbox-to-maildir
converter.
I've been hating mbox with a passion since forever, to the point that
I've considered switching to NMH for my mail, just for the fact that it
stores messages as (greppable) plain text files.

However, I don't know if it is doable with no experience with the codebase.

Anyone can tell me if I'm daydreaming or not?


Thank you a lot and then some!

P.s.: I'm posting this to both dev-quality and dev-apps-thunderbird, I
hope that's not too much of a Bad Thing.

--
Tobia Tesan
<tobia...@gmail.com>
If we can define our aim, we are halfway to achieving it.