Contributing to sympy and asking about GSOC projects

[Oscar Benjamin]

Hi all people on the SymPy mailing list,

There are a lot of posts right now on the mailing list from people who
are interested in contributing to SymPy and who are interested in
doing a GSOC project with SymPy which is great. Many of the posts are
asking the same sort of questions though so I just want to try and
answer them in broad terms here.

Lots of people are asking how they can get started contributing to
sympy. Quoting Chris from earlier:

You can check out Introduction to contributing and Development
workflow to get familiar with development. You can also check out
Easy-to-fix issues on our Issue Tracker to get started with
contributing.
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Introduction-to-contributing
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Development-workflow
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues

Also a lot of people are suggesting that they are interested in doing
some particular project for GSOC and asking how they should start with
that: if you want a sensible answer to a question about a GSOC project
then you need to ask a specific question.

If the question is
"""
I'm interested in project X and I've looked into it and found issues Y
and Z and it looks like a, b, c are already implemented so I want to
know whether it would be reasonable to pitch a project that would
complete d, e, and f
"""
then that's a direct question that can easily be answered by someone
who knows about project X.

If the question is
"""
I'm interested in project X. Please help me to begin working on this.
"""
then it is not easy for anyone to respond except by asking another
question (what do you need help with?).

If I see a direct question and I know the answer then I will reply. I
will probably not reply to an open-ended or vague question though
because there are a lot of them right now and it's not clear how to
reply. I think that other people take a similar approach as well.

Oscar

[Aaron Meurer]

Feel free to add something to this effect at
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GSoC-Student-Instructions. Also I
think it was discussed before to remove the step there about writing
to the mailing list, but it was never done. I think it should be
removed.

Aaron Meurer

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[Debojyoti Chakraborty]

Sometimes it is really annoying that in morning I am checking my emails there was only a lot of introductions and how to get start in gsoc,so probably a section like previously said great.

Regards,

Debo

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[Oscar Benjamin]

I've edited both of these pages so that they no longer "require"
introducing yourself on the mailing list:

https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GSoC-Student-Instructions
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Introduction-to-contributing

I've left the wording about the mailing list and introducing yourself
but changed it to "If posting for the first time..." rather than
suggesting that everyone *must* post an introduction an email.

--
Oscar

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