Hello everyone! I'm Navaneeth Suresh, a second-year undergraduate student at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I'm working with Mercurial on adding a functionality to store an unresolved merge-state as my GSoC project.

What did I do this week?

There was a video conferencing session with my mentors of 45 min duration last week, we scheduled weekly meetings and discussed on how to have a kickstart with the project. I was advised by my mentors to send a mail in the mailing list so that I'll get to know the opinions of people on my proposal. They insisted on explaining the working of an open source community to me and told that only mentor-mentee interaction might not be enough during the GSoC period. As a result, I had sent a mail and got to know the opinions of various people on the project implementation. I had written a minimal RFC patch for the proposed implementation. However, changes were made in my proposed implementation method and I finalized the pipeline for the implementation with the help of the community by splitting the whole idea into even more subtasks. I realized the importance of starting small and seeking opinion of community during this period. Pros and cons for various methods to implement the project were discussed and people in the community voted for the approaches. I picked up the approach with most votes.

What is coming up next?

As soon as the coding period begins next week, I'll be writing code for initial feature of the project. I was told to bootstrap the implementation as an Extension so that it cannot interfere with the core package and turns out to be buggy. So, I'll be writing an extension to support storing unresolved merge-states as commits. This will involve giving attention to a couple of things and changing the default behavior of some parts of the codebase.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

When I was trying to visualize the changes caused by a command called `hg shelve` after studying its code and behavior, I was unable to proceed. I asked the community for a solution. One of the members suggested a solution which I had already tried and failed. But, then they make me realize that there is no need to visualize those changes now and told me that is not the correct starting point as I'll be facing some issues and told to start with a smaller subtask which less intervenes with most of the code. Then, I moved to thinking of a minimal solution to the smallest subtask possible.

That's all for this week. I'll be blogging about the things happen in the later phase of the GSoC period. Stay tuned!