GSoC

Here are some ideas for 2011 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 three areas that we are most interested in getting project ideas for.

  1. Performance
  2. GUI support
  3. VCS interoperability

Below we discuss the three areas in greater details and provide some suggestions for the kinds of projects we'd love to hear proposals for. Note that these three themes are just to get you started. We welcome submissions beyond these initial ideas. Get in touch with us! darcs-users@darcs.net

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:

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:

Potential mentors: Eric Kow, Florent Becker (?)

VCS interoperability

Darcs lives in a big version control world. It's got the 3 majority distributed version control systems to compete against, not to mention SVN. But who said this needs to be about competition? What if Darcs users could send patches to Bzr and receive them from Git fans? What if working with any other VCS was just plain simple?

Related links:

Potential mentors: Eric Kow, Ganesh Sittampalam (?)

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

  1. 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.

  2. Check out the student guide to know what you're getting into

  3. Get in touch with the Darcs team if you have not done so already

  4. Write up your proposal (this should take a day or two). See the previous applications if you're having trouble getting started.

  5. Submit your application to Google

Older projects

  1. 2010

  2. 2009 - Hashed storage (Petr Rockai)

  3. 2007 - Darcs 2 research (Jason Dagit)