GSoC
—categories : Recruitment … Here are some ideas for 2012 Google Summer of Code student projects. We focus on a small number of ideas which we think are large enough to be worth a summer of hacking, but well-defined and self-contained enough to be doable.
Themes
Here are some areas that we are most interested in getting project ideas for.
- Performance
- GUI support
Below we discuss these areas in greater details and provide some suggestions for the kinds of projects we’d love to hear proposals for. Note that these themes are just to get you started. We welcome submissions beyond these initial ideas. Get in touch with us! darcs-users@darcs.net or #darcs on freenode.
Performance
Petr Rockai’s 2009 project made our hashed repositories a lot faster for day-to-day usage, but we still need help with fetching repositories over a network, working with large patches or large numbers of files and also with long repository histories.
Related links:
- http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1566 patch index (history; Benedikt Schmidt)
Potential mentors: Eric Kow
GUI support
We think Darcs is easy to use because it exposes a fundamentally simpler model for revision control: you have a tree and a set of patches; you send patches back and forth; that’s it.
Nevertheless, it would be extremely useful if there were graphical interfaces to Darcs, particular interfaces that give us new ways of looking at repositories that the command line one can’t do. For example, what about a patch dependency viewer?
Related links:
- GraphicalInterface - general GUI, maybe subsuming patch viewer
- PatchViewer - more specific to seeing relationship between patches (and branches)
- http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/17
Potential mentors: Eric Kow, Florent Becker (?)
Other projects
Keep in mind that you could always propose an project with a whole different set of ideas. Be creative! :-)
For example, if you’re particularly interested in cloud storage and security, you could think about a joint Darcs-Tahoe project. See the Tahoe GSOC page for ideas…
How to apply
Sketch out an idea. Can you make Darcs faster? Can you make it more useful? It would make sense to get in touch with darcs-users@darcs.net for some help.
Check out the student guide to know what you’re getting into
Get in touch with the Darcs team if you have not done so already
Write up your proposal (this should take a day or two). See the previous applications if you’re having trouble getting started.
Submit your application to Google
Older projects
2011
- DarcsBridge (Owen Stephens)
- V3 Primative Patches (Petr Rockai)
2010
- Darcs network performance (Alexey Levan)
- Improvements to darcs caching mechanism (Adolfo Builes)
2009 - Hashed storage (Petr Rockai)
- Petr’s application (Slightly post-edited after acceptance)
2007 - Darcs 2 research (Jason Dagit)
