Re: Git in Outreachy December 2019?

[Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 04:51:49PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 01:03:17PM -0700, Jonathan Tan wrote:
> 
> > > Do we have interested mentors for the next round of Outreachy?
> > > 
> > > The deadline for Git to apply to the program is September 5th. The
> > > deadline for mentors to have submitted project descriptions is September
> > > 24th. Intern applications would start on October 1st.
> > > 
> > > If there are mentors who want to participate, I can handle the project
> > > application and can start asking around for funding.
> > 
> > I probably should have replied earlier, but if Git has applied to the
> > program, feel free to include me as a mentor.
> 
> Great!  See my followup here:
> 
>   https://public-inbox.org/git/20190904194114.GA31398@sigill.intra.peff.net/
> 
> Prospective mentors need to sign up on that site, and should propose a
> project they'd be willing to mentor.
> 
> > There was a discussion about mentors/co-mentors possibly working in a
> > part of a codebase that they are not familiar with [1] - firstly, I
> > think that's possible and even likely for most of us. :-) If any
> > question arises, maybe it would be sufficient for the mentors to just
> > help formulate the question (or pose the question themselves) to the
> > mailing list. If "[Outreachy]" appears in the subject, I'll make it a
> > higher priority for myself to answer those.
> 
> I do think it's OK for mentors to not be intimately familiar with the
> part of the code that is being touched, as long as the project is simple
> enough that they can pick up the technical details easily as-needed. A
> lot of what mentors will help mentees with is the overall process (both
> Git-specific parts, but also more general development issues). But I
> think the proposed projects do need to be feasible.
> 
> I'm happy to discuss possible projects if anybody has an idea but isn't
> sure how to develop it into a proposal.

Hi Peff,

Jonathan Tan, Jonathan Nieder, Josh Steadmon and I met on Friday to talk
about projects and we came up with a trimmed list; not sure what more
needs to be done to make them into fully-fledged proposals.

For starter microprojects, we came up with:

 - cleanup a test script (although we need to identify particularly
   which ones and what counts as "clean")
 - moving doc from documentation/technical/api-* to comments in the
   appropriate header instead
 - teach a command which currently handles its own argv how to use
   parse-options instead
 - add a user.timezone option which Git can use if present rather than
   checking system local time

For the longer projects, we came up with a few more:

 - find places where we can pass in the_repository as arg instead of
   using global the_repository
 - convert sh/pl commands to C, including:
   - git-submodules.sh
   - git-bisect.sh
   - rebase --preserve-merges
   - add -i
   (We were afraid this might be too boring, though.)
 - reduce/eliminate use of fetch_if_missing global
 - create a better difftool/mergetool for format of choice (this one
   ends up existing outside of the Git codebase, but still may be pretty
   adjacent and big impact)
 - training wheels/intro/tutorial mode? (We thought it may be useful to
   make available a very basic "I just want to make a single PR and not
   learn graph theory" mode, toggled by config switch)
 - "did you mean?" for common use cases, e.g. commit with a dirty
   working tree and no staged files - either offer a hint or offer a
   prompt to continue ("Stage changed files and commit? [Y/n]")
 - new `git partial-clone` command to interactively set a filter,
   configure other partial clone settings
 - add progress bars in various situations
 - add a TUI to deal more easily with the mailing list. Jonathan Tan has
   a strong idea of what this TUI would do... This one would also end up
   external but adjacent to the Git codebase.
 - try and make progress towards running many tests from a single test
   file in parallel - maybe this is too big, I'm not sure if we know how
   many of our tests are order-dependent within a file for now...

It might make sense to only focus on scoping the ones we feel most
interested in. We came up with a pretty big list because we had some
other programs in mind, so I suppose it's not necessary to develop all
of them for this program.

 - Emily