Google Summer of Code -- 2006

Google Summer of Code -- 2006

Google is organizing a fantastic opportunity for students to help out with FLOSS development this summer, and get paid for doing it. More information is available on their site.

Monotone is a version control system, and we're one of the mentoring organizations for SoC 2006. The rest of this page contains information for students considering applying to the monotone project.

What makes us excited about working on monotone? We're trying to change how software development itself works -- to make it more pleasant, more productive, less frustrating, and more plain fun. Work on tools has a multiplicative effect -- your work can make ''everyone else's'' work more effective. We're pushing the boundaries of technology, inventing new methods for building distributed p2p systems, and robustly solving complex real world problems. Our ?history representation has become the de facto standard for new tools; the best existing merge algorithm was co-invented by a Monotone SoC 2005 student. We have a few more ideas up our sleeves still... if all this gets you excited too -- maybe this is a project for you :-)

For more information on monotone in general, the comprehensive ?manual has details on how monotone works, and the wiki (?FrontPage) is used for scratch work about various work in progress.

Monotone is written in clean and straightforward C++. A number of the projects below do not require C++ knowledge.

Ideas

Here are some example ideas for projects. Feel free to suggest others.

Largish projects

MergeViaWorkingDir: This has been a number-1 requested feature for ages and ages. Since the release of v0.26 this month, it is now reasonably straightforward to implement! This will involve getting nice and dirty with monotone internals, the details of how merging works, and have lots of crunchy UI questions too. I envision someone doing this having a basic working prototype merged into mainline in a few weeks to start getting user feedback, and then working on polishing the UI, or adding cool new things like NonMergeConflicts.
Create a performance test harness, and benchmarks using it. This would be extremely valuable for tuning monotone's speed, testing changes, and catching performance regressions. There are more details here.
UI work: find some friends, set them loose on monotone. Watch them carefully and take notes. Write up where-ever they get confused or make mistakes; come up with ways to stop them getting confused. Implement these ways.
"pserver" is the protocol that CVS uses. Those wacky git folks have implemented a pserver server in perl, so you can use a normal CVS client to talk directly to a git repository and do not just checkouts but also commits! Adapt their script to work against monotone; or, do one better and add pserver support to monotone itself, so that 'monotone serve' can accept connections directly from both monotone and cvs clients.
A branch review tool. Something that lets us look at changes compared to the place where a branch branched, make notes on changes, make our own changes, and then do appropriate things with each (e.g., send the notes to the mailing list and commit any additional changes to the branch directly).

Smaller projects

"Buy two, they're cheap"

MagicSelectors: enhancing the monotone command line
Add symlink support to monotone
Teach monotone to use ssh-agent to store keys
Add a way to specify "templates" for ?mtn automate output; useful for scripting!
"undo" for workspace operations. (Well... not sure if this is small or not.)
- clarification wanted: what is undo supposed to do?
- Answer: Use case: I run mtn up, and then realize that I screwed up the merge. I want to get back to where I was before. Use case: I meant to run "revert " but instead I accidentally reverted my whole workspace, including valuable uncommitted changes. I want to get back to where I was before.
monotone-dumb is a hack to let people host monotone repositories on cheap hosts that only provide static http/ftp access. It works, but could use a bunch of polish to be really usable. This mailing list post has a lot of ideas for things to work on.
Add the ability to spawn a process and speak netsync to it (a kind of generalized proxy support). Use this to teach monotone to run netsync over jabber/jingle, etc.
- clarification wanted: what about this? there's a branch that wants to provide an stdin/stdout interface to monotone. is reviving that and finishing it part of this, or something else?
- Answer: Yes, this is a generalization of the .ssh branch. Basically, the idea would be to make it possible to say mtn sync --connect-via 'ssh foo.com mtn serve-stdio', where the argument to --connect-via is an arbitrary command. This would allow people to add interesting new transports. (The UI given here probably isn't optimal, that's just to give the idea.)
Our test coverage has been hovering at about 90% for a long time: current status. Get it higher than that!
Support for "nested trees" -- Some way to combine several projects that are versioned separately into a single workspace, similar to CVS modules, or Arch "configs". There are a fair number of people interested in this, but no design yet; part of the project would be figuring out what exactly everyone wants from this capability.

Integration

A VCS is only one piece of the development ecology -- at least as important as the VCS itself is how it fits into the other tools people use. Examples:

Trac is a very popular wiki/bug tracker/source code browser, and it supports plugins for different VCSes. We need a monotone plug-in! Probably the thing to start from is the mercurial plugin. (python)
- Development of a trac plugin has already been started, see the trac-plugin branch.
We could use a good general, cross-platform (so probably Qt) GUI for history browsing and general modification. "guitone" is a possible start at this, in the monotone repository.
Eclipse and NetBeans are two great Java IDEs. They need monotone plugins! Some work has been done on each, but much more could be. (java)
Microsoft's Visual Studio needs a plugin too! (AnkhSVN is probably useful inspiration)
How about file manager integration? TortoiseSVN for Windows Explorer is good inspiration again; could do similar for OS X Finder, Gnome Nautilus, KDE Konqueror, ...

Ambitious

These are probably too big for someone who doesn't have familiarity with monotone already to do in a summer, but throwing them out there anyway:

File revival -- see HistoryBlueSky
"partial pull" -- fetching only a portion of history into a local database, for projects that have a lot of history.
SPKI-inspired naming and trust delegation. This is an area of active work for monotone developers.
Functionality similar to Quilt/StGit/Mq. See also for why this is tricky... but maybe if someone implemented it, we would discover it was not so tricky after all.

Oddballs

A few funky things, that are not strictly related to monotone at all:

"Chryn": Monotone could use a better library for event-handling (network stuff, signals, etc.); several of the things on the list above would be greatly helped by this. Chryn is a half-working prototype of a general async IO library for C++.
"Hedg": A mad idea of NathanielSmith's for how to build a better project management system, similar to Trac but with extra coolness. Talk to him if curious about details...

Notes on applying

So you're thinking of applying? Great! Here are some more general tips on what we're looking for:

Tell us who you are. Remember, we're basically not going to know anything about you but what your app says.
Tell us why you would be a great person to pick.
Show us you've thought about the project. Don't just copy and paste one of the projects on this page. Expand on it. Say what you think the most important parts are. Give us some idea what you think the schedule will look like. Even more important than a schedule, tell us what you think should be worked on first, and second, and what can be put off. That kind of thing.
In addition to showing us you're smart and skillful, show us you're enthusiastic. We're not really looking for people who just want some summer job to pass the time. Coding is fun! Version control is exciting! Or at least... we think so. Maybe that makes us dumb, but if so, we still want to find people who will support us in our delusion ;-).
Hint: we all read each other's code all day long. Giving us a pointer to where we can look at your code is one very good way to show us what you can do. You'll be speaking our native language.
Overall philosophy: We're a lot more interested in you than your project. Definitely talk about what gets you excited in your application, and tell us what you want to work on. If there are multiple things you'd be interested in working on, tell us that too! Bottom line, though, is if you can convince us that you're smart, motivated, and eager to learn and to teach, then you'll be in.

Different orgs will be looking for different things, but here are some other good hints on writing a good SoC app that seem compatible with how we like to do things:

If selected...

To give you some idea of how we like to run things, and what to expect:

Working on monotone should be your main activity through the whole summer. Going out of town for a week on vacation or whatever is fine, but this is a serious commitment and you're working for serious rewards; don't assume "oh, I can knock something out in the last few weeks" or "oh, 10 hours a week will be plenty" or whatever. (Don't worry -- if you run out of things to do, we'll be able to find something interesting ;-).)
Just to keep track of things, we'll require weekly status reports.
Obviously, you will have to use monotone to keep your work in progress; we'll give you commit access to our central server.
Just to say up front: we will not be judging project completion based on how closely you can "turn in" something at the end of the summer, that matches some list of features you wrote down at the beginning of the summer. Goals are important, but we'll be just as happy if you totally change your mind and implement something else cool, or end up writing a bunch of small-but-valuable changes instead of one big one. We'll judge on your effort, communication, and interest.
Feel free to drop by our IRC channel: #monotone on irc.OFTC.net (irc://irc.oftc.net/monotone). Depending on the time of day you might have to wait a bit for people to wake up, but there are usually lots of people around, and a lot of development discussion happens here. It's a great way to find out what's going on and get feedback on your ideas and application.