Fog Creek sponsoring students for Mercurial development

[Benjamin Pollack]

Hey all,

As part of our effort to contribute to Mercurial, Fog Creek is sponsoring a team of six Canadian students this semester through the University of Toronto's UCOSP program to work on Mercurial.  Their primary focus is going to be fixing bugs and contributing features that are immediately useful to us and to customers who use Kiln.  To get them started, they've been working on a collection of tiny projects to help get them familiar with Mercurial, mostly picked from things that we really wanted here at Fog Creek.  They'll be announcing those projects on here over the next week as they feel ready to do so.  I'm sure they'd greatly appreciate your feedback on what they should do to flesh them out, make them more widely usable, and so on.

In addition to general bug fixes, one of the primary things that we really want both internally and for Kiln are extensions that make Mercurial suitable for projects that involve large binaries.  To that end, a big focus this semester is going to be on exploring Greg Ward's bfiles extension as a possible way to address some of Mercurial's current shortcomings in that area.  If, however, there are any other bugs or features you'd really like to see them address, make some noise, and I'll see what we can fit.

While the ramp-up for this was done quietly to give students the chance to acclimated, things will probably get noisier from here on out.  So, for the moment, if you want to follow along, you can:

  * Subscribe to the UCOSP blog: http://ucosp.wordpress.com/
  * Join us for weekly status meetings in #ucosp-mercurial at 6:30 ET/3:30 PT
  * Follow the primary development hub at https://ucosp.fogbugz.com (guest/anonymous), or
    their mirrors on Bitbucket.  I'll be trying to figure out if there's a way to enable
    automatic login for the former somehow so that you can just click and browse.

Let me know if you have any questions.  I'm really excited by how quickly a lot of these students have gotten a grip on Mercurial's internals, and I'm excited to see what we'll accomplish this semester.

Please feel free to bug me, here or in private, if you've got questions.

Cheers,
--Benjamin