Re: GSoC 2011 : one more interested student.

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 4, 2011, 15:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20110404155731.GA30215@kytes>
In-Reply-To: <4D9912F8.60002@gmail.com>

Hi Cyril,

Cyril Roelandt writes:

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> I am currently studying Computer Science and Engineering. I have
> been using Open Source software for quite a while now, but I have
> not contributed a lot of code to Open Source projects - except for a
> few patches to Gnome.
> 
> Being a git user, I would be interested in working on this project.
> I believe that taking part in the GSoC would be a good opportunity
> for me to discover the guts of a version control system.

Thanks for writing.  We'd love to see more student proposals.

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> * Complete some libgit2 features
> Implementing a few key features seems like a great way to understand
> the way a VCS works. I would be interesting in working on the diff
> command and on the network related commands (git-push, git-fetch).
> 
> * Build a minimal Git client based on libgit2
> It seems to be a quite popular task :) Hacking on this small git
> client would be a nice experience and would help me understanding
> how libgit2 works.

Yes, libgit2-related work in general seems to be very popular among GSoC students this year :) Not to worry- you can make your application stronger by sketching out a solid proposal and showing us some code.

> * Build in more external commands
> I am wondering why these commands should be rewritten. You know what
> they say : "if it is not broken, do not fix it" :-p Do these
> commands currently have performance issues ?

As Nguyen already pointed out, the rewrite is mostly motivated by portability reasons.

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> I will be working in a research lab until the end of June, but I
> will have more free time in July/August, that I could use to hack on
> git, which means I may have less time than most US students, who can
> enjoy a slightly longer summer break. Do you think it would be
> possible to work one of these projects anyway ?

>From my personal experience, most of the GSoC ideas listed on the Git

wiki page are quite demanding. They're almost as engaging as a full-time job. I'd be especially worried about the mid-term evaluations. However, if you feel that you can take on a project, please do so by all means -- include a convincing timeline in your proposal.

Good luck with your application.

-- Ram