[Xapian-discuss] getting involved

[James Aylett]

On 22 Jan 2014, at 14:30, Előd Biszak <biszakelod at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am a young developer from Hungary. I have been using Xapian for quite a
> while, I am quite familiar with the basic concepts. I have tested various
> search engines in the past few years and for now Xapian seems the be the
> best choice for my purposes. I am willing to get deeply involved in the
> project.

Hi! Great to have more people involved. For the repo, check out <http://xapian.org/bleeding> which has all the information you should need. (git is recommended, as we're moving away from subversion; from GSoCs past we have experience working with github pull requests, but if you'd rather work off git.xapian.org and use patchsets I'm sure we can manage that too.)

> I am interested in the following tasks
[snip]

The only thing I'd say about the tasks you're interested in is that they're all quite "deep" in terms of needing to understand something hefty inside Xapian: matching, the query parser, weighting — and usually more than one of those will have to be touched. I of course won't dissuade you from working on those, but I'd recommend getting to grips with the codebase before diving into one of these larger projects. There are some "bite size" pieces on the wiki <http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProjectIdeas> which will enable you to get to grips with how the pieces fit together "under the hood", or you could see if any existing bugs or feature requests <http://trac.xapian.org/report/1> take your fancy. Spending a bit of time understanding how Xapian fits together at the code level should make working with it subsequently a lot easier.

There's also some internals documentation that you'll want to at least skim <http://xapian.org/docs/internals.html>, and you'll want to look at our HACKING file <https://github.com/xapian/xapian/blob/master/xapian-core/HACKING> so you know what support the build system provides for development, how to use more sophisticated features of the test framework, some coding standards and other useful info (it's a bit long, but worth reading right the way through).

Obviously, any questions either to the mailing list (xapian-devel is more appropriate when you're working on the Xapian code itself) or on IRC. It may take a few days for someone to get back to you, particularly if it's about part of the code which fewer people have worked on, but we're here to help.

Best,
James

-- 
 James Aylett, occasional trouble-maker
 xapian.org