Hello there
I understand where you are coming from, but I'm afraid this does not generalise to most package maintainers. It probably applies well to students (I was similar during undergrad, did a bucket load of packaging back then), but when one stops being a student, one tends to get busier with work (advanced studies/careers/jobs take 8 hours a day 5 days a week = 40 hours a week) and personal life (family/kids/pets/...).
So, given that the day continues to be limited to 24 hours, one has to start making the most of their quite limited volunteering time. Most people drop packages they're not using so they can at least take care of the ones they do use, others just go inactive and their packages get orphaned (you would've seen the mass retirement e-mails in the last few months)
Bex explains this very well: https://www.winglemeyer.org/ramblings/2019/01/07/cookie-cleanup.html#
Let's make the "long term contributor" a "nice to have" at the moment. If we can find a good candidate to do some serious packaging for us, that would be worth it too maybe?
That's what I was aiming for...
I won't have the time to mentor at the level GSoC requires. It's different to mentoring in the Fedora community---it's supervision where you become the most important point of contact for the candidate.
I think mentoring requires a detailed knowledge of packaging and build systems---if the candidate gets stuck, the mentor is expected to help them solve the issue.
We *could* mentor as a team, where the primary mentor remains the point of contact (and the one who does the process etc.) while the rest of us help with tasks. But, we must be sure that we'll be able to support the candidate at all times, through all issues.
The post emphasizes to have two mentors in contrast to a single mentor. I support your view on mentoring as a team, rather than having a single mentor. But, we would have to see who all from the team are ready to spend a bit more time helping us on this.
If we do have the resources, it is certainly worth pitching. I can advertise on the neuroscience mailing lists and so on. Maybe there are students out there who would like to go into neuroscience later, so it would work well for them.
To make it more attractive, we could say that the candidate will be encouraged to replicate a model and submit this replication to rescience maybe? That becomes quite neurosciencey, though, so it'll depend on the candidate's prior experience with the field.
https://rescience-c.github.io/
If we do not find a suitable candidate, we don't do it. How is that?
Advertising on the NeuroScience channels sounds like a great idea. It would definitely attract more students, who would be ideal for the project, in my opinion. That's how it is. But then if we don't find a suitable candidate, the Fedora project would have one less project this time, and it might reflect badly. Therefore, I guess we would have to be completely on board with this project. :D