My € 0.02 from the Git crew:
I can only underline what Darren wrote:
Personally, I think whatever is easiest for the student in question is best.
Let them decide. If the students prefer the Boost sandbox over GitHub, that's fine. However, I highly doubt it. At least the students I know are more comfortable with Git than with SVN these days. And GitHub has other benefits.
Mentors actually don't need any knowledge about Git at all. You see the code on the website with syntax highlighting. You can comment on commits. You can add comments to individual lines in the source code. If you want to try out the project, you can download it as tarball or zip archive.
Students will need to know how to commit changes and syncronize with a remote repository. You learn that here: http://try.github.io
Ready? Shall we use https://github.com/BoostGSOC as a common place for all GSOC repositories?
OK, I guess I could go for that for my GSoC project, even though I relish resisting change.:-)
So, students can assume that users have boost installed on their machine in a standard location, and can set up a separate git repository for their project. Great.
Right! Please spare the students with complicated setup. Let them concentrate on code.
<snip> What is your advice for a project (say mine) where a student might contribute, say, 10 files over the course of the project to Boost.Math, whereby math consists of hundreds of files? The GSoC files under construction are to be deeply nested within Boost.Math and can not be used without much of Boost. How should the student merge in order to check operation with trunk? With a merge tool? Which one? Do we really have to copy files back and forth? or is there a better way? I am so rank idiot here! Does each student need to make a carbon copy of trunk in their GSoC repo? I'm a little lost here and request guidance. Sincerely, Chris.