Re: Regarding a project long overdue.

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Hi, I'm going to reply CC'ing the maintainers' list. Sorry I didn't
reply before, was busy with the holiday season.

On Sun, 2013-12-29 at 02:23 +0530, address@hidden wrote:
> Dear Jordi
> I came across a link in previous years suggested GSOC projects regarding
> improving the efficiency of logm and sqrtm.
> http://wiki.octave.org/Summer_of_Code_Project_Ideas#Improve_logm.2C_sqrtm.2C_funm
> 
> I then followed the given links and also read through one of the papers
> discussed in the chat thread. I also came across a conversation between
> you and M Prassanna last year where he wanted to work on it but I dont
> know whats the status of the issue now ?.

As far as I know, nothing has changed since then.

> I have been following the mantainers mailing list for some time now
> but I find it really difficult to find a start point to
> contributing. I am pursuing an undergraduate degree and mathematics
> and the mathematical part of the problem doesnt seem to me very
> intimidating but sending in patches and how the whole open sources
> environment for the octave works seem to me really steep learning
> curve.

By the way, as a GNU package, Octave prefers to advocate for "free
software", not "open source":

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

As to how to contribute to Octave, follow these instructions:

   http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_can_I_get_involved_in_Octave_development.3F

If your internet connection is good enough, I would encourage you to
come to #octave in IRC so that we can have more hands-on discussion of
the particulars of how to contribute.

> I would be really glad if you could help me in the initial phase by
> directing me to the right start point or the snippets of code that I
> improve.

The first thing to do is to build the default Octave branch from
Mercurial. Most of this project is centred around understanding
Nicholas Higham's existing Matlab work and source code. You should
read his articles and perhaps email him too about the possibility of
translating some version of his work into Octave. However, beware of
reading any source code that is non-free, e.g. anything copyrighted to
The Mathworks. If you write code for Octave, we do not want your code
to be influenced by anything you saw in Matlab code.

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.