[RFH] hackday and GSoC topic suggestions

This Saturday I'm going to be attending a Git hackday held by Bloomberg in New York. The participants will be eager C coders who have experience using git, but not contributing to it. As somebody who has read The Mythical Man Month, I don't expect huge productivity, but I'm hoping to do some bug triage and fixes, and maybe get some people involved who might join the community. I'm hoping some of the folks will have features _they_ want to work on, and I can help get them started. But I'd like to have a list of potential projects to direct people towards as a backup.

On a similar note, the GSoC application deadline is Feb 14th. I am happy to be admin again and put together the application, but we will need an idea page. I'll set up a page to collect them, but in the meantime, please dump any ideas/discussion in this thread.

Below is a list of features / bugs that I am taking to the hackday. The bug list was collected by grepping the mailing list for items without responses. They haven't been triaged at all, so I'm sure some of them are "not a bug" or "won't fix". But the triage process is part of what we'll be doing on Saturday.

I don't think the list below and the potential GSoC list really have any overlap, as the project scales are completely different. But I'd be happy to take suggestions for either.

--- features:

 - negative refspecs
   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/240997/focus=241019

 - optionally remove tempfiles on failed pack-objects (especially when
   we get ENOSPC)
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241466

 - previewing "git pull"
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236732

bugs:

 - branch.*.merge interpreted too strictly by tracking logic
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241582

 - relative core.worktree is resolved from symlink and not its target
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241519

 - Branch rename breaks local downstream branches
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241228

 - git clone on out-of-space device causes incorrect errors
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241206

 - commit-msg hook and merges
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241203

 - inconsistent include behaviour for core.sharedRepository
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/241277

 - Rebase options '--whitespace=fix' and '--keep-empty' are incompatible
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/238055

 - git stash doesn't use --index as default
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/235892

 - git describe --contains --abbrev=0 <sha1> doesn't work as expected
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236707

 - using git commit-tree with "-F -" adds trailing newlines
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236583

 - Pull and fetch don't honor `--progress` flag
   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236257/focus=236262

 - Unexpected outputs of git pull on stdout v.s. stderr
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/235716

 - MERGE_HEAD lost with git checkout master
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/233806

 - git stash doesn't always save work dir as-is: bug?
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/234153

 - Well-past commit dates unsupported
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236827

 - we do not handle integer overflow in commit/author timestamps
   [no reference, but something I have noticed; we should probably
   return a sentinel "0" rather than a random overflow value, and
   we should probably detect and warn in git-fsck]

 - git stash does not work when directory is replaced by a symlink to itself
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/236798

 - rebase not recovering gracefully from repack error
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/234261

 - (broken ?) output of "git diff --color-word"
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/237370

 - git filter-branch does not make tree replacements permanent
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/220931

 - 'git show' gives duplicate errors for ambiguous args
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/205023

 - (git commit --patch --message $MESSAGE) disallows hunk editing
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/208213

 - filter-branch --parent-filter in bare repository
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/203619

insanely hard bugs:

 - shallow clones over http
   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/223682