Amsterdam Git Hackathon Ideas

amsterdam-git-hackathon-ideas.txt

These should all be things we can tackle in a day or a weekend with
relatively small knowledge of Git subsystems so someone with general
Unix/C programming knowledge can pick them up, Or a mature existing
patch series that we can help with.

* Is 8 threads optimal for git-grep?

  grep.c has this:

      #define THREADS 8

  Which was added back in
  5b594f457afcf2cdddb3c79de8bcc571c775aa55. Let's find out if we can't
  make this faster by using the method `parallel --number-of-cores`
  uses to find out the number of cores at runtime. Maybe 8 isn't
  optimal for e.g. 2 or 24 core boxes.

* Let's make git log's -G have a -P or --perl-regexp argument

  git-grep already has this now, but it would be neat to have it for
  git log.

  In the process we could split out the use of regcomp() into its own
  function which we could use more widely.

  Also it would be nice to have e.g.:

      git log -G'/foobar/i'

  I.e. just declare that arguments matching ^/(.*?)/(?:ism)*$ are
  regex operators, currently the operators to regcomp are hardcoded in
  the git source.

* Make git-bisect friendler

  Currently it prints out full sha1's, doesn't abbreviate commits,
  doesn't use color etc.

* Fix up the 31337 patch

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/183943 add a
  --collide option to git-commit and document it. Find out how to make
  the existing bitmask check efficient for arbitrary strings.

  Also try if doing the brute-forcing in N threads is faster.

  Note: Much of this was done by Jeff already, but we could document
  it etc.

* Fix up the remote-helper patches

  Starting with the fast export fixes at:
  https://github.com/SRabbelier/git/tree/fe-fixes
  we should be able to use 281eee4 (revision: keep track of the end-user
  input from the command line, 2011-08-25) to fix up the patch series
  to where Junio will merge it.

* Make the "ambiguous refname" error less useless

  Currently we have:

    $ git checkout -b avar/boobs -t origin/trunk
    warning: refname 'origin/trunk' is ambiguous.
    warning: refname 'origin/trunk' is ambiguous.
    fatal: Ambiguous object name: 'origin/trunk'.

  Which you have to find like this:

    $ git branch -a -l | grep trunk
      origin/trunk
    * trunk

   And fix like this:

    $ git branch -D origin/trunk
    Deleted branch origin/trunk (was 0021ca7).

   It would be much better if the error just listed why the refname
   was ambiguous.