GSoC Application [ Parallelism + Git.pm ]

[Subho Banerjee <subs.zero@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I am a fourth year undergraduate student of Computer Science and
Engineering at LNMIIT, India. I am extremely comfortable coding in
C/C++ and perl. I am really interested in taking up the Google Summer
of Code program for the "git" project. I have been a git user for a
couple of years now, though I was introduced to github very recently.
Though I have never tried tinkering around with the git source code, I
am a fast learner and I would love to contribute towards making git
better.

I had a look at the "Ideas" page on the GSoC website and I really
liked two particular project ideas, in which I believe I can
contribute to a larger extent.

* Improving parallelism in various commands
* Modernizing and expanding Git.pm


Previously, in the last two summers, I was an intern at the European
Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN). here I worked on mainly two
projects(though none of them used git for version control), whose
experience I believe can be used directly in the tasks I mentioned
above. Firstly, I was working on a HPC monte-carlo simulations and how
to make them faster using pthreads, openmp and cuda.  Secondly, I was
working on a grid middleware solution written completely in perl.

>From what I understand of these tasks --

* In the first one, which wants to parallelize certain commands in
git, I believe  the major challenges will be to actually find a large
list of commands which can be parallelized.In addition to the commands
mentioned in the Ideas page, only other place I currently think of
exploiting parallelism is in traversing the commit tree when one is
cloning a repository. I would really like it if someone can suggest
more places where this sort of parallelism might be usable, so that I
could use that to make a more complete application. I believe one of
the major difficulties I will initially face, is my unfamiliarity with
the code. This makes finding these commands which might have better
performance with parallelism a little difficult.

* For the second one, which aims at improving the Git perl module. I
tried looking around for this one on the net. I was a little confused
since I could not make out which module this was on CPAN. Is this one
of the Git::* modules or is it all of them. Because the the
functionality of the Git::Config and Git::Commit as mentioned in the
Ideas page seems to be there in the Git::Repository module on CPAN.
Could some one please clarify this.

I would really appreciate any ideas or advice for making my
application for GSoC 2012 better.


Cheers,
Subho.