[Haskell-cafe] darcs and Google Summer of Code

[Eric Kow]

Dear Haskellers,

Recently, there has been a suggestion that darcs apply to be a mentoring
organisation for Google Summer of Code in its own right.  Thanks!  I
think we will definitely try this out!

Ideas: GUI and hashed-storage
-----------------------------
So far, we have two active projects, active in the sense that there are
interested students and mentors.

The first is to work towards a sort of graphical interface for darcs (as
has been suggested on this list).  I suspect that we what we will likely
do with this idea is to refine it into something that may either be
part of a GUI (like a patch dependency viewer), or which will make it
much easier for third parties to write a GUI in the future.  I'll note
that last year, we had a few interested students for this year and a
potential mentor (Shelarcy from wxHaskell).  Hopefully we can call on
them again this year?  There is also some work by Wolgang Jeltsch and
students that we could talk about extending into a GSoC project.

The second idea is to continue our performance work.  Petr Ročkai has
done some very interesting work in optimising the way that darcs stores
files for its hashed and darcs-2 format repositories.  In one of his
tests, he reports having a possible tenfold speed-up in darcs whatsnew
times, and a halving of the number of filesystem calls in one his tests.
<http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1202>.  It would be very interesting to see
Petr continue this sort of work and perhaps tie it into of some of the
other optimisations the darcs community have in mind.

Anyway, you may be interested to know that we have a parallel discussion
going on about this on the darcs-users list:

  http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2009-February/017766.html

We are also keeping a summary of this discussion here with our active
ideas:

  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/GoogleSummerOfCode

Hackathon
---------
Finally, darcs will be holding its second hacking sprint within the
Haskell Hackathon, April 17-19, Utrecht.  There's already at least 5 of
us from darcs/camp, and we would love to see more of you.  Or if you're
already planning on joining Hac5, come hack a little darcs while you're
there!

  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Sprints/2009-04

Hope to see you soon,

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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