Git and Google Summer of Code

By Shawn Pearce, Open Source Team and Git Developer

Many of you may remember our most recent episode of the Google Summer of Code™ podcast, Getting Giddy with Git. Now that we're heading into the program home stretch, we're back with an update on the success (and failures) of Summer of Code within the Git community.

This year Git was fortunate enough to get 6 very hard-working students, focusing on a number of different projects to make Git more portable and run even faster. Among our high-profile projects for 2008, Miklos Vajna's native C port of git-merge entered the main tree on July 8th, just one day after the mid-term evaluation period began. Miklos' work shipped as a key part of Git 1.6.0, released on August 17th. We were also excited to see Marek Zawirski's push implementation for EGit (the Eclipse plugin) enter the main EGit tree on June 28th, weeks before the program mid-term. Difficulties working with SWT caused Marek's GUI implementation to be delayed, but it finally showed up at the last minute as a 31 patch series. We are looking forward to seeing this in the fall EGit release.

To read even more about all of our great student projects, see the mailing list thread Jakub Narebski started during the 'pencils down' period. Jakub offers an excellent summary of every student project, and many of the students provide more detailed updates later in the thread.