Histogram diff, libgit2 enhancement, libgit2 => git merge (GSOC)

Hi Git's community!

I'd like to ask you for some details about "histogram diff" and "libgit" enhancement/git-merge tasks for this year's GSOC.

Histogram diff: There is no mentor mentioned in [1]. Does it mean that there is no person who can be a mentor for this task or is that assignment possible to be mentored by everyone mentioned in other tasks? I'd like to do this task very much. After doing a small observing around source code of git/jgit it looks feasible for me. There is a goal "Get this feature merged to the upstream git." -- but I have one theoretical question -- what if the benchmarking/study of histogram diff leads to conclusion that this algorithm will not be useful for upstream? Does it mean "fail" in terms of GSOC? I have to think about it even if it looks that there should be speedup quite obvious. I don't want to fail a priory :).

libgit2: I really like the concept of libraries for to be binding-able from dozens of languages - this leads to expanding functionality among masses users almost everywhere. In this part I like the idea of implementing new features inside library (diff, config file parsing) but also maybe the task of merging libgit2 into git upstream. Basically I don't know much about that.. and you wrote that this task is more difficult then others, so I probably need to study git's and libgit's architecture very precisely beforehand .. but could you tell me some details about that? Is it impossible to do it before GSOC deadline and is it worth making a serious big efforts to this task (from your point of view onto project objectives)? How big are requirements for this task in term of GSOC?

Now it is quite hectic time because of my study :) it's been a long time since I've had time for myself but I'd like to prepare some patch for to proof my interests and abilities.

==== And now not so important part of message (you can skip).. I plan to write this informations later on to google-melange more precisely.

Something about me || I am:
-- I like C language but there is no problem to study more deeply other
    commonly used languages (I need only little brainstorming),
-- interested in Open Source in general, programming (especially in
    parallel), chess playing and challenges,
-- student of master's degree BUT (CZ), penultimate year of study, my last
    summer :(
-- a fan of Git because of many reasons, I'd like to become a contributor  
even
    if the GSOC opportunity wont come.
-- not so good English speaker so sometimes my messages could be a little
    harder to understand.

Experiences: In most cases I have only school projects experiences (even if programming projects are some kind of evergreen here in Brno). But I've had one Open Source experience -- enhancement for Daniel Stenberg's libcurl [2] followed with some continuing patches. The main patch implements shell-like wildcard pattern matching functionality for FTP protocol and makes an enhancement of API to allow implementing of this functionality among other protocols. (I've done implementation of wildcard "*.txt, [a-z]???.txt" compiler, auto testing script, enhancement for testing FTP server inside libcurl, man pages, .. ) The most difficult part was to understand how it works inside curl library -- but now I think I'm better in that aspect so I think I can make some useful work for Git too. ====

Don't worry please, my next messages will be much briefer :)

Pavel

[1] https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SoC2011Ideas [2] https://github.com/bagder/curl/commit/0825cd80a62c21725fb3615f1fdd3aa6cc5f0f34