Hi all, William suggested forwarding this correspondence about Trac. Feel free to add to it with your suggestions!
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Subject: Re: Some questions > Greetings, > I am having a bit of difficulty navigating the sage developer tracs > site. I thought maybe you could answer my questions... or you would > It is true that the Sage Trac is a behemoth. Here are a few recommendations before I get to a few other things. I always find http://trac.sagemath.org/wiki/TicketReports to be really useful. In particular, there are lists of beginner tickets, tickets you actually participated in, tickets needing review, and they can be sorted by component, time, and so forth. (In fact, after you get such a list, click on a column to sort by that column.) But that will still look hard. So what I often use is http://trac.sagemath.org/query which allows you the magic of searching by component, and which 'automatically' adds some booleans if you pick the same category twice or more. So I could search for tickets that "need something" in the game theory or translation components, instead of having to remember http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=needs_info&status=needs_review&status=needs_work&component=game+theory&component=translations&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&order=priority to type that in. Naturally, you will have your own ideas of what sounds interesting to work on in Sage. Finally, don't worry too much about the size of Trac. If there is something you want to work on, or a bug, or whatever, and you search reasonably thoroughly using a Google search with "sage trac my_problem" and a few others, feel free to open a ticket. You can also open tickets by creating a pull request at https://github.com/sagemath/sage but then you still have to find the ticket and put comments there... and that sort of presupposes you have read the developer guide which is another big thing, a somewhat steep learning curve. know who else I could talk to? There are lots of tickets... some of > them many years old... is there a reason why these don't get deleted? > Yes. They are not deleted for one of three reasons. 1. They are still valid, and we want to keep track of them. 2. They are no longer valid (or never were), but no one has bothered to check. 3. They might or might not be valid, but no one has bothered having (or, very often, *finishing*) the discussion about whether it is or not. But it's very little overhead to keep them open, and it provides a good place to start - checking on some five-year-old tickets and updating them to the current behavior is very valuable, but unfortunately not something enough people do (since it can be more fun to work on new projects). But we have no objection to closing (not deleting) truly outdated ones, and feel free to look. > I don't particularly know where I would start looking if I want to > just do some simple things to get used to using the interface... I > First I would recommend just browsing via the ticket lists. See all the different kinds of math, of computer programming, even of types of issues. Some things are nearly 0% mathematical, others require extremely advanced knowledge. Keep a look at the *component* of ones you feel are intelligible or interesting, and possibly also the contributors, as it's possible to search a little bit that way. Looking at what "needs review" is also good - not because you necessarily can give it full review, but just to start thinking about what a "good" change would look like. Is it documented? Are there tests to check the fix? Is formatting good? Are the reasons for the changes not even explained on the ticket? All of these are things to think about - if you want! > have read some of the documentation but there is a lot of > information... do you know of a specific site that would be best to > > Other than my other recommendations, I would suggest browsing the Developer Guide - http://www.sagemath.org/doc/developer/index.html It is also not small, and will have a lot of things not relevant immediately. But what it *will* have is to give you a sense of all the things that are involved in Sage. Very few people are experts in all of these aspects of development, but you can see a workflow, see that not just math but code, language, and (at least to some extent) formatting are valued, and so forth. (If you are already familiar with revision control then at least that part will be a lot easier, but we have some other conventions unique to Python/Sage communities.) Finally, *use Sage*! I have found way more things I want in it, or things that need to be tweaked, by heavy usage (and that of my students and colleagues around the world) than by just staring at some ticket on Trac that makes no sense. And in the end, it doesn't just make Sage better, it make the user a sharper mathematician/scientist. Good luck! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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