Re: Hello, I am new

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Moving this to the maintainers' list...

On 15 February 2013 13:51, czardoz <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm Aniket, a student of Mathematics and Computer Science. I'm new
> to Octave, but I would like to contribute to this project. I went
> through the projects page <http://wiki.octave.org/Projects> and
> found a few interesting ideas like "Implement a Cairo-based renderer
> for 2D-only graphics, with support for PS/PDF/SVG output (for
> printing)". Being new to octave, I would like to familiarize myself
> with this code. I think the best way to do it is try my hand at bug
> fixing.

Try browsing through here:

    https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave

Find a bug that is somewhere close to how you already use Octave, and
see if you can fix it. You should get yourself a dev setup so you can
debug Octave. The only way that I've managed to figure out how Octave
works is to step through it with a debugger. What's your preferred
IDE?

> It would be great if someone could help me understand the code
> though.

Have you already read through etc/HACKING? That gives a very broad
overview of the code layout.

> Also, I'm sorry if this post does not belong to the "general"
> mailing list.. I was a bit apprehensive about posting to
> "maintainers" directly without introducing myself.

You don't need to introduce yourself to write to the maintainers' list.
The general list isn't really a "general" list, it's a help list for
usage with Octave, and the maintainers' list is for hacking on Octave
itself. We should do something about this name in Nabble.

If possible, it's preferrable if you write to the list using an email
client instead of the Nabble interface. Nabble has a few bugs that
produce ugly emails.

Welcome,
- Jordi G. H.