[Xapian-discuss] Contributing to Xapian Projects.

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 11:38:54AM +0530, Rajdeep Das wrote:
> I went through several past/ongoing projects of Xapian.. I am interested in
> contributing to the projects based on Ranking. Few projects based on
> ranking that I find interesting are -  Implementation of various weighting
> Scheme, Learning to Rank and Clustering of search results.

I've done some updating of the list of GSoC project ideas earlier today,
including a few updates to those - the most notable is that we really
need to consolidate the previous work, so a Learning to Rank project
in GSoC 2015 should result in a module suitable for a stable release,
which means the focus should be on things like test coverage, fixing
bugs, improving documentation, rather than adding a lot of new
functionality.

Another ranking-related project idea we came up with, but which I have
not yet written up for the wiki, was diversification of search results
- that might also be of interest to you.

> I have a basic understanding of Machine Learning and Information Retrieval.
> I have a keen interest in competitive programming. Although I am a beginner
> with no prior experience of working in open source whatsoever.

That's OK - everyone has to start somewhere.

> I would like to contribute in the development of various feature ,but I
> don't know where to start.

I'd start with checking out the Xapian code from the git repo and
getting it to build.  Then find yourself a simple task to work on to
start to get familiar with the code.  There are some "bite-size"
ideas for projects here:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProjectIdeas

Cheers,
    Olly