[GSoC] Introduction

[altanis at ceid.upatras.gr]

Hello. My name is Alexander Altanis and I am a Greek University student
studying Computer Science and Informatics.

I am interested in participating to Google's Summer of Code 2008, as a
student for mercurial. I have looked through the project ideas, and
skimmed through the developpers' tutorial for Mercurial.

The ideas page doesn't delve into much detail, and as I am not familiar
with Mercurial's codebase, I find it difficult to give full, well-planned
propositions. Nevertheless, the ideas that interest me are partial
cloning, writing C versions for some low-level operations, and improving
TortoiseHg. By writing here, and studying a bit these next days, I am
trying to form a good plan and application.

Concerning partial cloning, I see that another applicant is already
interested in "horizontal" limits (ie cloning of the full history of
certain directories within the repository). However, I find "vertical"
limiting to be equally interesting (which is ironic, as the Audacious
repo, which I downloaded to test hg, took about half an hour to download,
and I really wished there was a way to download only the latest snapshots
:) ).

As for TortoiseHg, I was pointed to this page

http://tortoisehg.wiki.sourceforge.net/TODO

and I suppose I can take on a part of these features for GSoC, or maybe
come up with any original ideas.

Altanis Alexander