Re: Contributing to Octave help function.

[Ben Abbott]

On Jul 19, 2012, at 9:02 AM, Sergey Dudoladov wrote:

>   Hello,
> 
>   I've been using Octave for quite a while, and now I would like to 
> contribute some code to the project. 
>   I want to start with an easy mini-contribution, just to understand how 
> things work. 
> 
>   My first suggestion is to improve 'help' function by adding a 'dot' option 
> to it.
>   MIT OCW Course on Matlab  mentions that in Matlab command ' help . ' , that 
> is help + dot, lists a detailed list of operators (logical, relational etc.)
>   See the 11th slide of the lecture titled  "Visualization and programming".
>   
>   I use Octave version 3.6.1 , and it responds to this command with an error 
> message. So, I want to add this functionality.
> 
>   Any feedback  is welcome. In particular, I have two questions
>   1) Is it possible to do it using m-scripts only?  I currently don't know C 
> or C++.
>   2) Is there any detailed description of a code contribution workflow ( 
> besides contributors guide ) I can follow ?
>       I interested in things like "When and how often to build sources ?", 
> "What things should be changed in configuration files when I change a 
> function?" etc.

You can start with the info below.

        
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Contributing-Guidelines.html#Contributing-Guidelines

The help() function is an m-file, so it should be possible to make this change 
using m-files only.

Ben