Google Summer of Code and similar project guidlines

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 off for the next soc as
its a little late for this years 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 svn policy and patch submission guidlines
* 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 publically vissible, clean and
easy reviewable that again leads us to:
* use of a revision control system like svn
* seperation of cosmetic from non cosmetic changes (this is almost entirly
  ignored by mentors and students in soc 2006 which might lead to a suprise
  when the code will be reviewed at the end before a possible inclusion in
  ffmpeg, individual changes where generally not reviewable due to cosmetics)
* frequent commits, so that comments can be provided early