GSOC Application [gitweb]

Hello together,

I just received my Bachelors degree and am now starting the Masters courses at the University of Luebeck in Germany. I have been playing around with web development for a while now and would like to be a Google Summer of Code participant for the git project. Although I used git for quite a time now (maybe 2 years), managing an open source project on github recently introduced me to even more of it's power.

For my application, I would like to focus on gitweb. Looking at this year's proposals [1] the point "Use JavaScript library / framework in gitweb" caught my interest. I scanned through the current javascript code used by gitweb and noticed that there's not too much going on currently.

There are only 2 components where JS is used: Adjusting the time zone and incrementally looking up the data for blame. Since including a JS library (like prototype.js or jQuery) and refactoring the (small) existing code base to use the lib's methods doesn't look enough for GSoC, I wanted to ask what would be the best idea for a project proposal. Are there any additional features that you would like to see in gitweb?

I thought about creating a graphical representation of the tree (as proposed on last years idea list [2]) additionally or in exchange for the first idea. Though I couldn't think of the perfect solution (from a technology point) yet. Possible technologies would be using SVG, html5 canvas element or dynamically manipulated DOM elements (best browser support but harder to realize). Using special characters like 'git log --graph' does, seems to look a bit too retro in a web application.

What would you advice to maximize the chances of getting accepted to work on gitweb?

-- Philipp

[1] https://github.com/peff/git/wiki/SoC-2012-Ideas [2] https://git.wiki.kernel.org/articles/s/o/c/SoC2011Ideas_49fd.html