Regarding GSOC 2017 and contributing

[James Aylett]

On 23 Jan 2017, at 04:21, ASHISH SINGH <ashk43712 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, I am Ashish Singh currently in 4th year from BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus. I have a good knowledge of C++. I have also done relevant courses on Information Retrieval and Machine Learning. I looked at various projects that are offered for GSOC 17. The one that is of great interest to me is Learning to Rank Stabilisation. I have cloned and forked the repository. It would be really helpful if you could guide me on where and how should I start making contributions by fixing some small bugs or adding new features in this field.

Hi Ashish. We generally recommend that people pick up small things from anywhere in Xapian, because not all projects have small things that are suitable to start with. However in the case of LTR the main focus will be on getting good coverage of the system using automated tests, and you could certainly look at writing some tests of existing functionality to get started. I strongly recommend that you email or discuss on IRC what you're going to test before writing any code, because some parts of the API are still subject to change in our stabilisation work, and so make less good candidates than other parts.

I assume you've already looked at the project in some detail, but I've added some notes to the intro on the projects page (https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoCProjectIdeas#Project:LearningtoRankStabilisation) which should help.

J

-- 
 James Aylett, occasional troublemaker & project governance
 xapian.org