Projects for the next Outreachy round

Hi everyone, especially Shuqi and Kousik,

September 29 is the deadline for proposing Outreachy projects. As we have at least one mentor for now (me), we should propose at least one project though.

All ideas for projects are welcome, don't hesitate to suggest one! But the simplest would be to continue one of the projects we proposed for this year's GSoC which is just over. By the way, congrats to Shuqi and Kousik for successfully completing their projects!

So Shuqi and Kousik, please tell us if you would like to continue working on your projects or if it's Ok if we propose them for Outreachy.

About "Unifying the pretty and ref-filter formats", I don't think there are a lot more atoms to work on, but maybe that would be enough work if Kousik stopped working on it after his current work on mailmap options for some atom is merged (which might happen soon).

About the "More Sparse Index Integrations" Shuqi worked on, mentored by Victoria, I am likely not the best person to mentor it, but I think I could manage. It would be nice though if I got an idea about what should be done next and how much work is left in general in this area. (Shuqi's GSoC final report at https://cheskaqiqi.github.io/2023/08/22/Final/ doesn't talk much about this.) Perhaps even if Shuqi is continuing to work on the project, there is still work that could be done in parallel on other commands than the ones he is working on.

Sorry for the late request, but please let me know soon about this.

Thanks, Christian.

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 04:48:12PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:

Thanks.

I would like to continue working on the project and hopefully complete the duplication of the remaining pretty formats into ref-fitler.

Hi Kousik,

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 6:39 PM Kousik Sanagavarapu <five231003@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, I will not propose the project for the upcoming Outreachy round then.

Thanks for your answer and for continuing to work on it, Christian.

Christian Couder wrote:

To be honest, I'd recommend against using "More Sparse Index Integrations" as a project again - I was actually going to suggest "retiring" the project after this past GSoC term. The remaining commands are all fairly complex, to the point that they'd be challenging even for someone that's done a lot of sparse index work.

All that said, if someone is *really* interested in this project, you might be able to get it to work. You'll probably want to limit the scope to one command and make sure there's a strong emphasis placed on testing. Sparse index integrations can introduce a lot of subtle bugs (e.g. the one Shuqi found in 'diff' [1]), and a buggy command is worse for users than lacking sparse index compatibility.

I hope that helps!
- Victoria

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20230811142211.4547-3-cheskaqiqi@gmail.com/

Hi Victoria,

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 7:18 PM Victoria Dye <vdye@github.com> wrote:

Ok, I will not propose that project then.

Sure, thanks for the interesting update on this, Christian.

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 7:48 AM Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:

It is probably premature for this cycle. But once we have unit testing framework[1] in, I expect that moving tests from t/helper/test-foo.c + a sh test to invoke test-foo over to using the unit testing framework could be a tidy project for GSOC/Outreachy. Especially if we can have an example migration to refer to, which Siddharth from Google is working on in his 20% time just now :)

1: https://lore.kernel.org/git/cover.1692297001.git.steadmon@google.com/

Hi Emily,

On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 12:23 AM Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com> wrote:

Thanks for the great idea! I am going to propose this as the coding part of Outreachy should start only in December and I think there are good chances that the unit test framework will be merged by then. In case everything is not ready when Outreachy starts, I think we will probably find other unit tests or libification related work that the intern can do.

For example, I recently thought about converting commands that store config info in global variables and use old config functions like git_config_(int|bool|string|...) to instead use the git_config_get_*() functions and no more global variables. I wanted to ask about it today, but I think your suggestion would be better.

Thanks, Christian.

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 10:48 AM Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi  Christian,

I'm afraid I won't have sufficient time to take on the remaining commands in the upcoming school year. I'd like to leave those for other contributors who are interested.

Sorry for not providing more details in my final report. In 2023 ideas[1] git write-tree, git diff-files, git diff-tree, git worktree have all been successfully implemented with sparse index integration.There are some remaining issues in git check-attr related to diffs.[2][3]

Two other commands on the list are being worked on by Raghul: 'git describe' has been successfully integrated, 'git diff-index' still need more work. The remaining commands on the list have not been started on.

[1]https://git.github.io/SoC-2023-Ideas/ [2]https://lore.kernel.org/git/20230811142211.4547-3-cheskaqiqi@gmail.com/ [3]https://cheskaqiqi.github.io/2023/08/20/Week9-10/

hope that helps! Shuqi

Hi Shuqi,

On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 5:30 AM Shuqi Liang <cheskaqiqi@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure, no worries. As per Victoria's suggestion, I will not propose this as a project for the upcoming Outreachy round though.

Thanks for this information! The details will be useful to contributors interested in this.

Best, Christian.