Re: A beginenr wishing to get involved

[Nicholas Jankowski]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 3:35 AM, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 04:24:26 +0800, Ben Ph wrote:

Much of Octave is made up of m-files. If you want to get involved with
Octave without knowing much C++, you might start by studying from and
helping to improve the m-files that are part of Octave's core runtime.

To add my 2 cents, that is how I started getting involved. I'm running on Windows, and while it's easy enough to set up the version control software to pull down the codebase, compiling is really best done in Linux. So, even if I was up to the task of meddling in the c-code, I can't easily compile and test. But m-code can be developed and tested right in the program itself, Mercurial will generate a patch for you without needing the ability to fully compile, and I've been writing (bad) m-code for 15+ years now. Makes for a nice low-barrier-to-entry contribution mode.

I found a bug in an m-file and was able to put a fix together. I found a missing function I needed, put in a bug report, and a couple of us made an m-file implementation. I found an old bug report of another missing function, and did the same. And I'm generally noisy on the help mailing lists.

So how you want to get involved really depends on your current knowledge, familiarity with the tool, and interest level.  I personally think the easiest way is to start with 'missing function' requests. i think there used to be an automated list of these, somehow comparing to matlab, but I don't think that exists anymore. You can search bugs.octave.org for 'missing function' and see what's there. In my opinion now that there's a solid GUI, function coverage is one of the biggest areas people would use as reason to not use Octave.

Nick J.