GSoC Project Ideas for 2013

Here are some ideas of possible 2013 summer project ideas for Mercurial. Your own ideas are welcome. You may decide to work on these ideas or use them as a starting point for your own. Either way, come talk to us in #mercurial in Freenode or on the mercurial-devel@selenic.com mailing list.

1. Improved built-in help

Mercurial's built-in help is 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
• Improving performance of the status command
• Eliminating unnecessary checks of unknown files in merge/update
• Optimizing performance on Windows

4. 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. (here is a previous incomplete effort)

5. Other ideas?

Come talk to us on IRC.

CategoryGsoc