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Current Things To Do

stengel edited this page May 30, 2011 · 7 revisions

Welcome! If you are a contributor to the Gambit project, this is meant to be the starting page to get some orientation, and also to find out what you should do next.

30 May 2011

I have started a description of our Vision for the project.

24 May 2011

I think this wiki is a good way to communicate, rather than sending emails around, because it provides a central point of call and has some permanence. Also, people can refer to it in case some points are not clear.

We are just starting this so we have to find out how to organize it, and for example this page might have to be presented chronologically backwards to have the most recent and most relevant stuff at the top. (Hence the date for this entry.)

Everyone should have a github account and a wiki on it

Our collaboration tool will be github. Everyone should get an account, and tell it to Ted Turocy, who will then add you as a collaborator.

On https://github.com/stengel/gambit/wiki/Technical-help I put some crude description on how I set out the account for myself; github itself describes very well necessary steps. I found it is worth playing around with the buttons and experiment, rather than seeking help on the internet.

You will create a repository for your code. You will copy code from the "official" gambit part and play on your own, and can later merge any developments.

With your repository comes a wiki.
(Click on "Wiki" and follow instructions.)

Everyone should create some wiki pages to describe what they are currently doing, and we can cross-refer to it.

For editing these wiki pages you use some low-level markup language which you can choose on the right with "Edit mode", default "markdown", which is much simpler to type than HTML. In addition, the text is readable as plain text. You can choose your "Edit mode", and the only thing I suggest is the following

Rule: URLs are permanent

which means to say: if you have chosen to create a page, its title will become the file name and URL, like for this page https://github.com/stengel/gambit/wiki/Current-Things-To-Do and as soon as you send an email around with that URL in it "see what I have written here", please keep the file name even if you later think of a better title.
This way others who link to your page are sure that these links do not go stale.

The wiki part of your repository also has a button "Pages" which works like a table of contents, except that the order of pages is alphabetical (another reason to let people get used to your page titles and not change them).

On your wiki, I suggest everyone has a page "About myself" or similar where they introduce themselves so we know a little bit about each other. A good start may be your application for GSoC, which is only known to us mentors but not to all collaborators.

Another page "My projects" may be a good thing to describe what you want to do, and your understanding of it, questions, experience.

We don't have to document everything that we do, and can later delete blind alleys that we walked into, but I think it helps tremendously if we can write about these things.