Hi all, I'd like darcs to be a mentor for the google summer of code this year, and the applications are next week. So I'm asking for ideas and volunteers to be mentors. The latter is as important as the former.
Ideas off the top of my head: * Move darcs to use Data.ByteString.Lazy instead of our own FastPackedString. And perhaps throw in some optimization and benchmarking. * A benchmark suite for darcs. Possibly make it version-control-system independent, so we could have automated and meaningful performance benchmarks against competitors? Would need to be flexible to simulate real workloads and automatically generate real repositories. * Develop a new binary patch type that is more efficient in space and time. Again, requires some sort of benchmarking. * Add support for a character-based hunk patch type. May require tuning of the LCS algorithm, if we want this to work for large files. * Other interesting new patch types. * Gui support. Eric's done some work on the wxhaskell gui, but there are locking issues with his current code, and it could really use an overhaul. This would be a problem where the student would need to propose a quantifiable goal. * Conflicts work? I'm a bit unsure whether this is appropriate, as it's something I plan on working on with Jason. Could he apply as a SoC student, even though I'm his masters advisor? * Git backend support? Juliusz, do you think you'd be able to mentor a student on this? Could a student handle it? * GADT existential phantom witness types. We have the idea--which has been pretty well worked out--of how to use witness types to enforce proper (safe) manipulation of patches, but there's the large project of putting this into practice. It'd probably require someone of Ian or Ganesh caliber to mentor, and a very serious and experienced Haskeller as the student. But it's definitely a major code improvement (incidentally, gaining no new functionality) that requires a lot of time, and will be *extremely* cool. Volunteers for mentors are *seriously* needed. I can help, but I'm getting married this summer, and will be out of darcs communication for the month of July. So if you'd be willing to mentor on any of these projects, speak up! -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University _______________________________________________ darcs-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel
