If you want to help out with Cadabra, or think you can contribute a useful add-on package or perhaps just a sample notebook or a bit of documentation, you are more than welcome! Even just dropping us a note with some details about what computations you do with Cadabra is a useful contribution, and helps to get a better idea of what people expect from the software.
Below are some tips on how to get started contributing to Cadabra. For any questions, please post in the [questions and answers][1] forum or get in touch directly via [email][2]
The first thing to do is to get familiar with how the software works, by playing with the [tutorials][3] Details of the software, including some of the logic that is behind its inner workings, are described in the [reference guide][4], and documentation is available separately for all [properties and algorithms][5]. If you get stuck, do not hesitate to post a question on the [questions and answers][1] site. If you want to contribute at the level of the C++ core, or if you are simply interested in how things work behind the scenes, you will find the [doxygen][6] documentation useful.
Most likely you will have used (or will have tried to use) Cadabra for a concrete project, and found that you see room for improvement. This can be as simple as reporting a bug, perhaps even fixing it, or adding a tutorial or other documentation, providing add-on functionality in the form of packages, or helping with the core. We are also always interested to hear about issues installing Cadabra on new systems.
Contributions in any form are welcome, but if you want to submit substantial code contributions, it is useful to get familiar with the git version control system. This is used to track software changes over time and to effectively manage contributions from different authors. We also utilise [github][7], a web interface to git, extensively and use it for communication, issue tracking, merging patches (pull requests) and so on. Check out the source code from there and follow the instructions on how to build it.
To generate debug output, we use the [dbg][8] facility. To turn this
on for a particular source file, comment out the DBG_MACRO_DISABLE
definition at the top. You will then get nicely formatted debug output
while running.
Code is formatted using tabs for indentation, K&R style braces,
with some fine-tuning. All is taken care of by make format in the
top-level directory, which runs through the entire source tree and
does a reformat using astyle.
We have tutorials, manual pages and reference documentation. In addition, there are user-contributed notebooks. In this sense, we try to follow [divio][9]. Contributions to all of these parts of the documentation are welcome.
[1] https://cadabra.science/qa/ [2] mailto:info@cadabra.science [3] https://cadabra.science/tutorials.html [4] https://cadabra.science/help.html [5] https://cadabra.science/man.html [6] https://cadabra.science/doxygen/html/ [7] https://github.com/kpeeters/cadabra2 [8] https://github.com/sharkdp/dbg-macro [9] https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/