Re: contributing to Octave documentation

[Rik]

> Subject: Re: a small fix for hist.m

Doug,

How excellent that someone else wants to work in the documentation corner
of Octave!  I contribute elsewhere, but my principal goal has always been
to improve the documentation.

Eventually, one needs to become familiar with Texinfo and all the macros we
use, but the best starting point is to just modify an existing
documentation string.

One thing that would make our lives easier would be to add an entry to the
appropriate ChangeLog file which describes the changes you have made.  For
documentation, this can be pretty short such as '* hist.m: Add additional
calling options to docstring'.  The nearest ChangeLog file is in
<octave_topdir>/scripts and you will see the format.  Once that is done you
can check the complete change in to your local repository and then send a
patch with 'hg export' rather than 'hg diff'.  Eventually, if your patches
are mostly clean every time, we can arrange to get you write access to the
repository.

Cheers,
Rik