client: Paul Eggert, UCLA
Eclipse already has plug-ins for many source control systems, but is missing support for Git, the version control system used by the Linux kernel and many other open source projects. There is currently a project to create an Eclipse plug-in for GIT, but it is still missing many features, and because the developers choose to use a combination of three different software licenses, GPL, LGPL, and EPL, for different files there is no chance of this plug-in becoming an official Eclipse subproject, or inclusion in the base distribution. One possibility is to contribute to the current project; another is to start a new project with the goal of becoming an official Eclipse subproject.
If we joined the egit project, we would not start out as committers and would have to submit patches conforming to the current projects standards. There are no guarantees that the egit team will respond in a timely manner, though looking at their source tree shows that the project is being actively developed. Would need to define features (which has a wish list) to implement that would mark success.
If we create a new project, we immediately have access to source control and have more say over what features are important and how to define success. This might be too big of a project for 8 weeks. One way to make the project smaller would be to wrap the current C GIT APIs with JNI and let the students call those with the understanding that we will re-implement the JNI wrappers as pure Java as time allows.