Proposal for GSoC, want to get your opinions

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Monday, 25. February 2008, Evgeniy Ivanov wrote:
> Hi!
> I have an idea to implement git support. Has this proposal a chance to be
> applied? I have some another ideas, but I like this much more than others.
> I will be glad to get any answers.

Will this task be enough to warrant 2-3 months of work?

During the recent GHOP, two students wrote backends for my Version Control API 
(server-side, PHP, for Git and Mercurial) in about one week each. Given, 
those were pretty smart guys, and they didn't have to implement many 
functions of the respective version control system, but with a bit of effort 
you can get a basic interface running in virtually no time.

There's already a working interface in KDevPlatform, and two "example" version 
control backends (CVS and Subversion) that can be used as templates, so 
there's probably not much work left than the actual interfacing code.

I propose to start ambitious and include all three major DVCS (Git, Mercurial, 
Bazaar) in the task description for an eventual GSoC proposal.

The nice thing with version control backends is even if the student backs off 
somewhere in the middle, the resulting code can still be reused with little 
effort, and if there's more backends with, say, one not being finished then 
the other ones still work as well.

So:
1. Finish basic functionality for a working Git backend.
2. Finish basic functionality for a working Mercurial backend.
3. Finish basic functionality for a working Bazaar backend.
4. Stuff that I can't think of because I didn't follow the evolution
   of the VCS interfaces and where stuff is still lacking.

That would make a rather nice GSoC project, I believe.

Cheers,
  Jakob (not available for this year's Summer of Code as a student)