Re: GSoC 2019: Git's application submitted

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 9:51 PM Оля Тележная <olyatelezhnaya@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It would be nice to have a few more project ideas.
>
> I am not sure I have additional ideas for 3-month project for the intern, but
>
> > https://git.github.io/SoC-2019-Ideas/ currently lists only 2 possible
> > projects:
> >
> > - Unify ref-filter formats with other --pretty formats (which is new)
>
> I am ready to act as a mentor in this task, I know that part of
> project good enough.
> I have additional related task: We have a function called
> oid_object_info, it allows to download meta-info of the file. It was
> used in cat-file, and inspired by that example, I improved ref-filter,
> so now ref-filter works faster with it. Moreover, I have found that
> oid_object_info allows to get the contents of the file. It was useful
> in ref-filter, and actually it could be also useful in cat-file, but
> we still download the file differently in cat-file, and it looks
> awkward. I need to make just one last move to finish my patch: it will
> close the task about migrating cat-file formatting logic to
> ref-filter. But cat-file still will not use general way to download
> the file. So, the task is to get rid of additional file-reading logic.
> I guess this task is much smaller than original one, but at least the
> student will have chance to finish it in 3 months.
> My patch is here: https://github.com/git/git/pull/568
> But I hope you will also see it this week in the mailing list.
> Proposed task is in TODO in the end of ref-filter file.
>
> By the way, we had a letter from Google, it is said that our tasks are
> sparsed. I am not sure I understand it correctly. Should I help the
> project somehow to solve our issues?

I'm a little hesitant to suggest this as I'm not sure how available I
could be for mentoring and don't view myself as a good mentor, but
another project idea which has lots of sub-pieces and thus could show
progress and be useful even if not everything is completed:

Consistency of sequencer commands:
* The suggestion to fix an interrupted rebase-i or cherry-pick due to
a commit that became empty via 'git reset HEAD' (in builtin/commit.c)
instead of 'git rebase --skip' or 'git cherry-pick --skip' ranges from
annoying to confusing.  (Especially since other interrupted am's and
rebases both point to am/rebase --skip.).  Note that 'git cherry-pick
--skip' is not yet implemented, so that would have to be added first.
* There are a handful of flags that am-based rebases support that are
not available to interactive/merge-based rebases; it'd be nice to
implement them for the interactive machinery.  (There are also
numerous flags that only the interactive machinery supports that are
unavailable to am-based rebases, but I don't care; I want to deprecate
am-based rebases.)
  * --ignore-whitespace (transliterate to -Xignore-space-change?)
  * --whitespace=...
  * --committer-date-is-author-date/--ignore-date
  * -C4

[There's also some empty handling (from "Behavioral Differences" in
Documentation/git-rebase.txt) that would be nice to address, though
that might be contentious and I might try to tackle that piece before
GSoC gets rolling...]

Bonus: Make a flag to allow rebase to rewrite commit messages that
refer to older commits that were also rebased.  (i.e. if rebasing
commits A and B, and commit B says "This reverts commit <sha-of-A>,
then rewritten B's commit message should say "This reverts commit
<sha-of-rewritten-A".)  Do this for both sha1sums and sha1sum
abbreviations in commit messages.