GSoC Project Ideas for 2011

Sample project ideas for GSoC students

1. Improved built-in help

Mercurial's built-in help in quite good, but could be better. Here are some things that could be done:

• Improve HTML rendering in hgweb view (see here)

• improve crosslinking between help topics
• migrate remaining contents from manpages into built-in help
• add example usage to verbose sections in help
• improve the glossary

2. Advanced Hgweb support

Our web interface is very handy, but there are a number of features that could be improved:

• Add functions and conditionals to the templating language
• Add basic AJAX functionality to make history browsing more dynamic
• Add some basic web admin functionality

3. Performance tuning

Mercurial is fast but could always be faster. Possible areas include:

• Optimizing startup performance
• Optimizing revlog parsing and indexing with a C index class extension
• Improving performance of the status command
• Eliminating unnecessary checks of unknown files in merge/update
• Optimizing performance on Windows

4. Subrepo support

Subrepos are a rapidly improving feature of Mercurial.

• Improved support for SVN and Git repo types
• Addition of other repo types

5. Command server

Mercurial's primary stable API is its command line interface. Creating a tool and library to communicate with this API over a pipe or a socket will help improve performance for third-party tools that use Mercurial.

6. Other ideas?

Come talk to us on IRC.

CategoryGsoc