Re: Participating in Outreachy's December 2026 cohort

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 9, 2026, 09:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD1hAjtPuWL8asZ2LzEMJKHGh2oO73n_tsUSADtEHh9b-g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAP8UFD0oYnoXgQ84wHbGg3+QhX78Ucn_CXXYOe8uFpReb7X1Ng@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 10:26 AM Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Usman, Kaartic and Pablo for volunteering to co-mentor!
>
> As no one objected to Git participating in Outreachy, I will submit a
> Community Application for Git very soon.

I have submitted a Community Application for Git, see:

https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/git/

It says that we are willing to mentor and sponsor 2 interns. Hopefully we can have two (co-)mentors for each intern.

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> We will still have to sign up as mentors and find and submit projects
> for interns to work on soon. We have until September 11, 2026, at 4 pm
> UTC, which is less than one week from now.
>
> I have been thinking about the following projects:
>
> 1. Continue removing global state (and perhaps start libifying some
> parts of the code base).
>
> I think Tian Yuchen said there is not much work left related to
> "environment.{c,h}". So maybe we need to adjust the project compared
> to its previous description or maybe make it about actually libifying
> some parts of the code base.
>
> 2. Improve how command arguments and options are scanned and parsed.
>
> There are still a number of places in the code base where command
> arguments are scanned or parsed using ad hoc hand-rolled code instead
> of an existing API like the parse-options API or the early-scan API I
> recently proposed in
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260902161047.476753-1-christian.couder@gmail.com/.
> Those pieces of ad hoc parsing or scanning code are often buggy and
> difficult to maintain. I think porting them to an API while improving
> that API if necessary can be an interesting project and bring a lot of
> long term benefits to the project. As the parse-options API is already
> quite feature-full, there are likely some areas where porting the
> parsing code to it should be relatively easy which is newcomer
> friendly.
>
> Let me know your opinion about these and if you have other project ideas.

As no other project ideas were suggested, I submitted the project ideas I mentioned above. You can see them in the "Approved Projects for Git" section of the above mentioned page (https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/git/) as:

- Improve how command arguments and options are scanned and parsed
(https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-dec-2026-internship-cohort/communities/git/#improve-how-command-arguments-and-options-are-scan)
- Reduce Git’s global state to enable Git's libification
(https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-dec-2026-internship-cohort/communities/git/#reduce-gits-global-state-to-enable-gits-libificati)

The links to these projects are currently only available to approved mentors and coordinators. I applied to mentor both of these projects as this was required to submit the projects, but I am very much willing to remove myself from mentoring one of these projects.

So please apply to (co-)mentor one of these projects, or submit other projects you are willing to mentor if you prefer.

Also let me know if you see things that could be improved in these projects or the Community Application for Git.

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> > Last year the Git community mentored a single intern. For a long time
> > GitHub or GitLab used to sponsor Outreachy interns working on Git, but
> > last year both declined to do it, so the intern was sponsored by the
> > Git project itself.
>
> I will start poking people at GitLab about this, but it would be nice
> if we could get some kind of help with this regarding other companies
> too.

I have mentioned GitLab, GitHub and OpenAI as organizations that could potentially sponsor Outreachy interns. I have also proposed an "Outreachy sponsoring" topic to be discussed at the Git Contributor's Summit 2026 next week.

Thanks.