Re: Participating in Outreachy's December 2026 cohort

[Siddharth Asthana <siddharthasthana31@gmail.com>]

On 09/09/26 14:42, Christian Couder wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 10:26 AM Christian Couder
> <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Thank you Usman, Kaartic and Pablo for volunteering to co-mentor!
>>
>> As no one objected to Git participating in Outreachy, I will submit a
>> Community Application for Git very soon.
> 
> I have submitted a Community Application for Git, see:
> 
> https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/git/
> 
> It says that we are willing to mentor and sponsor 2 interns. Hopefully
> we can have two (co-)mentors for each intern.
> 
>> We will still have to sign up as mentors and find and submit projects
>> for interns to work on soon. We have until September 11, 2026, at 4 pm
>> UTC, which is less than one week from now.
>>
>> I have been thinking about the following projects:
>>
>> 1. Continue removing global state (and perhaps start libifying some
>> parts of the code base).
>>
>> I think Tian Yuchen said there is not much work left related to
>> "environment.{c,h}". So maybe we need to adjust the project compared
>> to its previous description or maybe make it about actually libifying
>> some parts of the code base.
>>
>> 2. Improve how command arguments and options are scanned and parsed.
>>
>> There are still a number of places in the code base where command
>> arguments are scanned or parsed using ad hoc hand-rolled code instead
>> of an existing API like the parse-options API or the early-scan API I
>> recently proposed in
>> https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260902161047.476753-1-christian.couder@gmail.com/.
>> Those pieces of ad hoc parsing or scanning code are often buggy and
>> difficult to maintain. I think porting them to an API while improving
>> that API if necessary can be an interesting project and bring a lot of
>> long term benefits to the project. As the parse-options API is already
>> quite feature-full, there are likely some areas where porting the
>> parsing code to it should be relatively easy which is newcomer
>> friendly.
>>
>> Let me know your opinion about these and if you have other project ideas.
> 
> As no other project ideas were suggested, I submitted the project
> ideas I mentioned above. You can see them in the "Approved Projects
> for Git" section of the above mentioned page
> (https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/git/) as:
> 
> - Improve how command arguments and options are scanned and parsed
> (https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-dec-2026-internship-cohort/communities/git/#improve-how-command-arguments-and-options-are-scan)
> - Reduce Git’s global state to enable Git's libification
> (https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-dec-2026-internship-cohort/communities/git/#reduce-gits-global-state-to-enable-gits-libificati)
> 
> The links to these projects are currently only available to approved
> mentors and coordinators. I applied to mentor both of these projects
> as this was required to submit the projects, but I am very much
> willing to remove myself from mentoring one of these projects.
> 
> So please apply to (co-)mentor one of these projects, or submit other
> projects you are willing to mentor if you prefer.


Applied as co-mentor on the parse-options / early-scan one.

Thanks,
Siddharth


> 
> Also let me know if you see things that could be improved in these
> projects or the Community Application for Git.
> 
>>> Last year the Git community mentored a single intern. For a long time
>>> GitHub or GitLab used to sponsor Outreachy interns working on Git, but
>>> last year both declined to do it, so the intern was sponsored by the
>>> Git project itself.
>>
>> I will start poking people at GitLab about this, but it would be nice
>> if we could get some kind of help with this regarding other companies
>> too.
> 
> I have mentioned GitLab, GitHub and OpenAI as organizations that could
> potentially sponsor Outreachy interns. I have also proposed an
> "Outreachy sponsoring" topic to be discussed at the Git Contributor's
> Summit 2026 next week.
> 
> Thanks.