[GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Jakub Narebski]

We are now according to Google Summer of Code 2008 timeline
  http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html#0.1_timeline
after final evaluation deadline (September 2: 12:00 PDT / 19:00 UTC).

Therefore I and perhaps other on git mailing list would like to know 
what is the status of all git GSoC 2008 projects. We could then write
summary about each project at http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2008Projects
page.

So students and mentors, please write what do you think current status 
of project is: is it done, is it ready, is it perhaps already merged 
in, or can be merged in at any time.  Please write also what wasn't 
done, or what should be done different way (hindsight and all that).

Students, could you please tell us if you plan to work on git further, 
and in what range (how much time can you get to work on git). What do 
you think about git development community? What have you learned from 
participating in GSoC?

Mentors, could you tell us your side about how it was working as a 
mentor for Google Summer of Code? Perhaps some tricks of trade?
Have you herd perhaps about non-Git projects involving Git, like
Git# project(s) from Mono, DVCS support for KDevelop from KDE,
Git plugin for Anjuta IDE from GNOME; how did they fare?

Thank you all very much for your work on Git projects on this Google 
Summer of Code.


Below there is list of various Git's Google Summer of Code 2008 
projects, in the sequence the are on Git Wiki
  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2008Projects

1. GitTorrent
 
Student: Joshua Roys
Mentor: Sam Vilain

2. git-statistics

Student: Sverre Rabbelier
Mentor: David Symonds

3. Gitweb caching

Student: Lea Wiemann
Mentor: John 'warthog' Hawley

4. Eclipse plugin push support
 
Student: Marek Zawirski
Mentor: Shawn O. Pearce

5. git-merge builtin

Student: Miklos Vajna
Mentor: Johannes Schindelin

6. git-sequencer

Student: Stephan Beyer
Mentor: Christian Couder, Daniel Barkalow

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Daniel Barkalow]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> 6. git-sequencer
> 
> Student: Stephan Beyer
> Mentor: Christian Couder, Daniel Barkalow

The code's written, and we've been reviewing it, but the end of the summer 
kind of crept up on us (me, anyway) along with the 1.6.0 timing, and we 
didn't get it in mergeable shape in time for the evaluation. 
Post-evaluation, Stephan's been continuing to clean up the code as we 
review it. While Christian and I will probably go on finding more things 
to improve about it, it's probably also ready for a wider audience now.

	-Daniel
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Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Joshua Roys]

Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
> So students and mentors, please write what do you think current status 
> of project is: is it done, is it ready, is it perhaps already merged 
> in, or can be merged in at any time.  Please write also what wasn't 
> done, or what should be done different way (hindsight and all that).
> 
> Students, could you please tell us if you plan to work on git further, 
> and in what range (how much time can you get to work on git). What do 
> you think about git development community? What have you learned from 
> participating in GSoC?
> 
> 1. GitTorrent
>  
> Student: Joshua Roys
> Mentor: Sam Vilain
> 


Hello all,

VCS::Git::Torrent can only transfer data under limited circumstances at 
the moment, and doesn't do peering.  Part of that is actually due to 
work done after the deadline, unfortunately for me :-)  Anyway, I am 
definitely interested in continuing to work on git (and GitTorrent) as 
it is the VCS I use personally.  It is, however, the start of the 
semester here and I am currently focusing on that and job searching as 
this is my last semester.

I had a really good experience working with the git community over the 
past few months.  It was really cool to see very talented people working 
together.  It was a little intimidating too.  Another thing I learned 
about was the 'O' in OSS, or being 'Open' about development.  This is a 
completely different paradigm for me, as all of my previous experience 
is personal development or 'corporate' development (things done at 
work), neither of which required telling anybody about anything until 
completion.  Regular status updates that were requested during the 
second half made that much more clear and, in fact, facilitated my 
understanding in this area.

So, thank you all again, and I hope to continue to work with you in the 
future.

Joshua Roys

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Stephan Beyer]

Hi,

my reply belongs to:
> 6. git-sequencer
> 
> Student: Stephan Beyer
> Mentor: Christian Couder, Daniel Barkalow

Jakub Narebski wrote:
[...]
> So students and mentors, please write what do you think current status 
> of project is: is it done, is it ready, is it perhaps already merged 
> in, or can be merged in at any time.

It is done, but not ready.

This means, we, my mentors and I, are currently still reviewing the code.
But I am pinched for time until the end of September due to an important
exam. My mentors also have not much time and so everything is a little
slowed down.
When they ACK, it will be sent to the list.

> Please write also what wasn't done, or what should be done different
> way (hindsight and all that).

During the GSoC application phase I have done a breakdown and I declared
two items as "bonus" if I am really quick with the rest. But I wasn't
that quick, so none of the bonus items have even begun.

Those were:
 6. [bonus] rewrite the users in C
 7. [bonus] discuss (with git development team and/or mentor)
    sequencer features needed for gitk and implement them

Now I think (7) is even more needed/interesting, e.g. to be able to do
interactive rebasing with gitk.

And (6) shouldn't be that hard, but it will be even more interesting when
sequencer is libified. I have some ideas for that, but I think, this is
not so important in near time. Perhaps, there are other parts that need
some libification first. :)

> Students, could you please tell us if you plan to work on git further, 

Yes!

But due to my current lack of time I have ignored some topics on the
list that I am interested in. :-(

> and in what range (how much time can you get to work on git).

This is fluctating.

> What do you think about git development community?

Strange people. Lunatics. Geeks.

:-)

> What have you learned from participating in GSoC?

In the beginning: portable shell is a mess. ;)
Well, I guess I have learned a lot more...

Regards,
 Stephan

-- 
Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>, PGP 0x6EDDD207FCC5040F

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Sverre Rabbelier]

Heya,

Replying to:
> 2. git-statistics
>
> Student: Sverre Rabbelier
> Mentor: David Symonds

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 23:15, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> So students and mentors, please write what do you think current status
> of project is: is it done, is it ready, is it perhaps already merged
> in, or can be merged in at any time.  Please write also what wasn't
> done, or what should be done different way (hindsight and all that).

I consider it a successfull project, although it might not be what
some hoped it would be, I am happy with it. I plan to submit it for
inclusion in /contrib in the near future. I hope to work on improving
move detection in git log when time allows.

> Students, could you please tell us if you plan to work on git further,
> and in what range (how much time can you get to work on git). What do
> you think about git development community? What have you learned from
> participating in GSoC?

I very much plan to continue development, now that my day-to-day life
seems to have stabilized (after being on vacaction to the USA for a
month). I enjoyed working with the git community, especially the 'real
time' help on #git has been very usefull!

-- 
Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Miklos Vajna]

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On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 11:15:56PM +0200, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> 5. git-merge builtin
> 
> Student: Miklos Vajna
> Mentor: Johannes Schindelin

builtin-merge is merged. I did not have it in my proposal, but support
for custom merge strategies is also merged. Lately I was working on
a better merge-recursive API, that is mostly in next now.

Time did not permit, but I was about to rewrite merge-octopus,
merge-one-file and merge-resolve in C as well.

I hope I'll have time to do it later in my free time, but I can't
promise anything, being a fulltime student as well. ;-)

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Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Shawn O. Pearce]

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> 4. Eclipse plugin push support
>  
> Student: Marek Zawirski
> Mentor: Shawn O. Pearce

Marek's work is fully merged into egit.git.  Most of it merged
before the pencil's down date, but the final push (and bonus fetch)
UI parts merged just after it.

In my opinion this turned out to be a very successful project, and
Marek has become a really good contributor.  I'm happy to have found
him, and even happier I stole him away from the Eclipse Foundation
(where he also had a GSoC application filed).

I suspect he won't be contributing 6k lines of code per month now
that school semesters start again, but I think he's interested enough
(and had enough fun doing it) to stick around.  Actually its really
good he can't contribute 6k/month, I don't have time to code-review
6k/month.  :)

-- 
Shawn.

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Marek Zawirski]

Regarding...
> 4. Eclipse plugin push support
>
> Student: Marek Zawirski
> Mentor: Shawn O. Pearce


Jakub Narebski wrote:
> So students and mentors, please write what do you think current status 
> of project is: is it done, is it ready, is it perhaps already merged 
> in, or can be merged in at any time.  Please write also what wasn't 
> done, or what should be done different way (hindsight and all that).

Project is done, it's merged to master of egit, as Shawn pointed. I also
consider it successful, for sake of my experience too!

I was hoping to do some optional task after push GUI (2nd part of GSoC),
but instead I was designing/polishing the new GUI and existing clone
wizard. Created code was also base for later added (after GSoC) fetch GUI.

The downside is that there was not enough time for even starting stuff
like binary delta (re)implementation. This became huge task, as there
are serious libxdiff related license-issues. So it probably needs to be
implemented from scratch basing on existing research and pack file
format knowledge, but not the code.

> Students, could you please tell us if you plan to work on git further, 
> and in what range (how much time can you get to work on git). 

I enjoyed coding here, so I except to keep on working on egit. As you
may see (looking on my activity on the list) I'm pretty busy last time -
doing overdue exams, getting credits or having vacations (that's
especially hard labor...). So I won't work on egit next weeks for sure.
Later, I'm back to university again, so my activity may vary/be limited
during some periods. But I except to take some missing feature and work
on that in free time.

> What do you think about git development community?

Folks that I don't know how spend that much time on Git producing
portions of nice code...

Actually, I learned here what community in open source projects means.
Even if Git is not considered user-friendly, its community definitely is.

> What have you learned from participating in GSoC?

Among other things, I learned here using Git ;), doing development in
more open source way (e.g. where patches review/comments is natural
process), and somewhat doing development of product that is intended to
be highly reusable and effective.

(...)
> Thank you all very much for your work on Git projects on this Google 
> Summer of Code.

Thanks too!

-- 
Marek Zawirski [zawir]
marek.zawirski@gmail.com

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> 5. git-merge builtin
> 
> Student: Miklos Vajna
> Mentor: Johannes Schindelin

My 2 cents: a full success.  Details are public, so no need to repeat all 
that here, right? ;-)

Was also nice to read it on kernel trap (last sentence in the announcement 
of Git 1.6.0).

Ciao,
Dscho

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Jakub Narebski]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> Mentors, could you tell us your side about how it was working as a 
> mentor for Google Summer of Code? Perhaps some tricks of trade?

By the way, I have found via LWN that Perl has written nice summary
of theirs Google Summer of Code projects[1].  Among other they very much
praise that students did blogging about their progress:

  "use Perl | Summer of Code recap"
  http://use.perl.org/articles/08/08/29/1224242.shtml

  Most of the students did a great job of blogging their progress, which
  I think is an important part of Summer of Code for the rest of the
  community.

What do you think about it (for example about doing it in a future
if our informal Git Development Community would participate in next
Google Summer of Code programs)?


[1] I plan to add quick summary of final results to GSoC2008 wiki page, 
http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2008Projects, of course if GSoC manager(s),
mentors, or students don't do it first...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
> > Mentors, could you tell us your side about how it was working as a 
> > mentor for Google Summer of Code? Perhaps some tricks of trade?
> 
> By the way, I have found via LWN that Perl has written nice summary of 
> theirs Google Summer of Code projects[1].  Among other they very much 
> praise that students did blogging about their progress:
> 
>   "use Perl | Summer of Code recap"
>   http://use.perl.org/articles/08/08/29/1224242.shtml
> 
>   Most of the students did a great job of blogging their progress, which
>   I think is an important part of Summer of Code for the rest of the
>   community.
> 
> What do you think about it (for example about doing it in a future
> if our informal Git Development Community would participate in next
> Google Summer of Code programs)?

I think that it is better to require frequent interaction on the mailing 
list, or at least on IRC.

Blogging is nice for those who want to follow the progress of a project, 
but do not want to get involved.  In this case, it is even better than 
having the people discuss the issues of the project openly, as reading a 
blog does not require constant monitoring like the list does.

However, blogging costs time.

I think that in the case of Git, those who are interested are those that 
will work on (as opposed to "with") those projects, too.  So I think the 
time is better spent on the mailing list.

Especially given the fact that the interested parties can guide the course 
of the project early, i.e. before a blog entry would be written (just 
think about the Git.pm thing; both Lea's and Joshua's project could have 
benefitted from enhancing the existing Git.pm according to their needs).

My cent,
Dscho

Re: [GSoC] Git projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 final evaluation

[Shawn O. Pearce]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > 
> > > Mentors, could you tell us your side about how it was working as a 
> > > mentor for Google Summer of Code? Perhaps some tricks of trade?
> > 
> > By the way, I have found via LWN that Perl has written nice summary of 
> > theirs Google Summer of Code projects[1].  Among other they very much 
> > praise that students did blogging about their progress:
...
> > What do you think about it (for example about doing it in a future
> > if our informal Git Development Community would participate in next
> > Google Summer of Code programs)?
> 
> I think that it is better to require frequent interaction on the mailing 
> list, or at least on IRC.

I agree with Dscho completely.  We are an email based community.
Students should be involved by email, not by blogs.  If we were
the Ruby community (which near as I can tell is blog based) then
blogging might make more sense.  We're not.  We're an offshoot of
the Linux community, which is very much email-centric.

> Blogging is nice for those who want to follow the progress of a project, 
> but do not want to get involved.  In this case, it is even better than 
> having the people discuss the issues of the project openly, as reading a 
> blog does not require constant monitoring like the list does.
> 
> However, blogging costs time.

Exactly.  Email also costs time, but typically we don't see
traffic on the list that is just broadcasting something pointless.
In general people only start a topic if there is going to be
worthwhile discussion attached to it, and often that results in a
useful patch being applied at some point in the future.  IOW that
time for email is just necessary in the course of development,
so it isn't wasted.

If the community of semi-interested people really wants blogs to
read, RSS scrape a news feed like Gmane.  Ohloh already has an
RSS feed defined around the emails sent to git ML with the subject
"[ANNOUNCE]".

I however prefer email, and dislike blogging, so I'll continue
to use the git ML in the future, and so will any student I mentor
in any potential future GSoC program.  FWIW I blogged here at new
day-job on company internal blog for about a half day before I gave
up and said "damn, that really is stupid".

-- 
Shawn.