Google Summer of Code - TortoiseHg and integration with Shell (Nautilus and Windows)

[Benoit Beraud]

Hello,

I'm currently considering possibilities for an application for GSoC.

A short presentation about me : I'm currently a PhD student in France,
I'll just begin my third (and last year) the 1. April. I'm quite
familiar with programming, I used a lot of programming languages in my
life, the one I'm most familiar with nowadays are PHP and Javascript,
.Net (VB but it does not really matter in fact), and C. I used a bit
of Python for very small projects before but I can't say I'm very
familiar with it (I'm capable of hacking some code but I'm still not
very comfortable with the development of a whole application in
Python).

For the GSoC I would like to work on TortoiseHg. What interest me the
most in this project is the integration with the different shells
(Windows and Nautilus). On this topic I think that the first thing to
work on is the development of the equivalent of InotifyExtension for
Windows. This is pretty important because if TortoiseHg sucks because
of bad integration with Windows (or Linux but job has already been
done), it won't get massively adopted (even if it has the greatest
core code and the greatest possibilities). As I'm already a bit
familiar with the use of the Windows API, I think I might help on it.
I worked with Windows APIs for other purposes but I already find some
documentation about the API functions required to listen to changes
inside a given path. I do not know exactly how much time I might need
to work on it.

Then the other topic I would like to work on is directly related to
the first point and concerns the overlay icons. I found on TortoiseHg
websites that work has to be done on this topic. I don't know if the
information is still up to date but this is something that will get my
interest. If this is already done, the TODO list of TortoiseHg is long
enough to be sure I'll find something to work.

What do you think about this idea of project ? I know I'm very very
late for considering the application to GSoC but I just heard about it
Friday ... and my weekend was already pretty full of other things to
do. Hope you might find some time to answer before tonight, otherwise
I'll just apply and I'll work on refinements of my projects later on.

Thanks in advance for any good advices.

Benoît