Developing- Where to Start

Hello all,

I'm a third year Computer Science student at the University of Notre Dame, and for the final project of my Data Structures class, my group and I have to find a way to contribute our (hopefully) newly-found data structures and optimization knowledge to a well-known open source project. We thought Git would be a great project to work on, but we have no idea where to start. Can anyone offer ideas or parts of the code that we could possibly help with? (a problem that is data structures-related would be extremely helpful!)

Many thanks, Breanna Devore-McDonald

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 10:42 PM, Breanna Devore-McDonald <Breanna.S.Devore-McDonald.1@nd.edu> wrote:

The Git project often participate in the Google Summer of Code.

This year we used the following resources to help potential GSoC students get involved in developing Git and find a project to work on:

http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Microprojects.html http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Ideas.html

A GSoC wrap up has been written recently in Git Rev News edition 7:

http://git.github.io/rev_news/2015/09/09/edition-7/

Earlier this year students from Ensimag (Grenoble, France) also contributed to Git and a small wrap up is available in Git Rev News edition 5:

http://git.github.io/rev_news/2015/07/08/edition-5/

I hope this will help you get started in your Git development journey.

Best, Christian.

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:

One problem focused around data structures may be rewriting the git bisect internal algorithm. Currently git bisect uses an O(n^2), but there are better algorithms available such as [1]

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hzF8fZbsQtKwUPH60dsEwVZM2wmESFq713SeAsg_hkc/edit?usp=sharing
  The algorithm presented in that doc came up in a discussion
  between some Git developers, I just wrote it down. Maybe it's
  understandable.

That said, usually the tests in git bisect take the most time, so it is an internal optimization related to data structures, whose impact is estimated to matter only a bit. Also I would estimate the project to rewrite git bisect to be quite a lot of effort.

Yeah the microprojects are awesome to get into Git development! Also look at http://git-blame.blogspot.com/p/leftover-bits.html for smaller projects.

Breanna Devore-McDonald <Breanna.S.Devore-McDonald.1@nd.edu> writes:

Hello,

I am a teacher and I offer my students a similar project. I maintain a list of small projects as source of inspiration for students:

  https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SmallProjectsIdeas

Some advices before you get started:

* Start with a very, very small contribution, as soon as possible. The
  list of microprojects from GSoC is a good place to start, and the
  easiest projects in the page above can be of interest too.

  This way, you will:

  - Understand how submitting contributions work (if you haven't done
    so, read https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/SubmittingPatches )

  - Get an idea of how productive you are when working with the Git
    codebase.

* Even for the actual project, don't try something hard. The difficulty
  here is not to write the first draft, but to get it properly tested,
  reviewed, to respond to reviewers, and finally get the code accepted
  into git.git. Unlike traditional school projects, you can't anticipate
  difficulties (no teacher wrote the correct version for you in
  advance...), and the quality standard is much higher than what you're
  probably used to. A rough heuristics: estimate how long you are going
  to take for your project, multiply by 2 or 3, and you're still getting
  an underestimation.

  As a comparison, for Google summer of code, a very good student works
  full-time for 2 months and writes about 2000 to 3000 lines of code.

  BTW, how long is your project? How many students in your group?

* Interact with the mailing-list as much as you can and as early as you
  can. What you want to avoid is to write a large amount of code and get
  it reviewed at the end of your project. That would almost certainly
  result in requests for changes that you wouldn't have time to apply.

OK, that may all be a bit discourraging ;-). But it shouldn't: it's _really_ very interesting to contribute to a project like Git.