[Outreachy] Introduction: Tanga Joris, option parsing project

Tanga Joris· Oct 20, 2026, 22:11 UTC · lore

Resending in Plain text

Hi everyone,

My name is Tanga Joris. I'm a software engineer based in Nairobi, Kenya and I am about to graduate from university:)

I'm an Outreachy applicant for the December 2026 round, and I'd like to work on the project "Improve how command arguments and options are scanned and parsed". I am really sorry for starting late; I hope you are okay with that.

I've been interested in version control for a long time, and I've run into parsing problems in my own projects. In a CLI tool I built, a global --addr flag only works before the subcommand: "kiln run --addr x" fails because the subcommand's flag set doesn't know about it. I later noticed Git has the same rule, for example "git remote -v" has to come before the subcommand, and that got me curious about how Git scans and parses its arguments.

For my microproject, I'd like to convert the " ... and %d more." message in builtin/checkout.c (suggest_reattach()) from _() to Q_(). So far I haven't found anyone working on it in the archive, but please let me know if someone already is.

Thanks, Tanga

Usman Akinyemi· Oct 22, 2026, 10:01 UTC · re: Tanga Joris · lore

Re: [Outreachy] Introduction: Tanga Joris, option parsing project

On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 11:15 PM Tanga Joris <tangajoris@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Resending in Plain text
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> My name is Tanga Joris. I'm a software engineer based in
> Nairobi, Kenya and I am about to graduate from university:)

Welcome Tanga,

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> I'm an Outreachy applicant for the December 2026 round, and I'd like
> to work on the project "Improve how command arguments and options
> are scanned and parsed". I am really sorry for starting late; I hope
> you are okay with that.
>

Thanks for your interest at Git project. There is no problem with that at all. Git is open to contribution everytime.

Show 12 quoted lines

> I've been interested in version control for a long time, and I've run
> into parsing problems in my own projects. In a CLI tool I built, a
> global --addr flag only works before the subcommand: "kiln run --addr
> x" fails because the subcommand's flag set doesn't know about it. I
> later noticed Git has the same rule, for example "git remote -v" has
> to come before the subcommand, and that got me curious about how Git
> scans and parses its arguments.
>
> For my microproject, I'd like to convert the " ... and %d more."
> message in builtin/checkout.c (suggest_reattach()) from _() to Q_().
> So far I haven't found anyone working on it in the archive, but please
> let me know if someone already is.

You can work on it if you already noticed that no one is working on it.

>
> Thanks,
> Tanga

Thanks. Usman.