development help

vongmun

Joined: 2006-08-17
Posts: 8
Posted: Fri, 2006-09-08 10:13

Dear admins

I have expressed my interest in joining the development team. I know that in order to help, I have to understand the program design or architecture. So, what I am doing is to read and try to understand the source code file by file. I am not sure whether this approach is appropriate. It would be very good if the documentation of the program architecture is available or that you could give me some advice on how to better understand the program (i am a novice programmer). thank you.

 
ckdake
ckdake's picture

Joined: 2004-02-18
Posts: 2258
Posted: Fri, 2006-09-08 15:30

The best way to start understanding the code is to take a bug report or a feature request (or a feature you want) and dig around to try and figure out how to fix it. Feel free to ask questions and ask where in the code you should look for particular things, but just reading the code with the hope of understanding is sometimes tough. Another option, though perhaps less fun, is tracing how the code does something. Take one of the unit tests and try to follow the path through the code that the unit test is checking.

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vongmun

Joined: 2006-08-17
Posts: 8
Posted: Thu, 2006-09-14 11:57

thank you, i will try what you told. However, i think that the documentation that explains how the program is organized (class diagram...) as a whole will be more helpful for beginner like me.

 
ckdake
ckdake's picture

Joined: 2004-02-18
Posts: 2258
Posted: Thu, 2006-09-14 21:26

We are a bit behind on our documentation. You can certainly dig around at http://codex.gallery2.org/ through what we have, but I'm not aware of current class diagrams, er models, or uml anywhere.

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