Forum: how-newcomers-can-easily-contribute-to-the-ocaml-batteries
Posted by: Edgar Friendly languages. It builds upon the current minimal standard library provided with the compiler, and the ExtLib effort which extended it with several useful functions and modules. Again, Batteries is a community effort: it is developed by volunteers that have gathered, starting from the 2008 OCaml Meeting, to solve what they thought was one of the most pressing obstacle to the ease of use of the OCaml language. This means everyone can participate in the Batteries effort, and we're proud to say that we're doing our best to help non-frequent contributors and simple users to have an impact on the project. There are lots of things you can do to help us on the Batteries front. Our manpower is scarce and we are aware of a lot of places where the state of Batteries is lacking. Most of them are simple things, but fixing a lot of simple things is a lot of work; you can help. - We need your help to improve documentation. Documentation should be a major aspect of every software project, evermore for base libraries. Documentation is admittedly one of the weak points of the current state of Batteries. It has evolved a lot since its birth, some module miss basic documentation, and some documentation of older things that have changed is inconsistent. Don't hesitate to report such issues. We would appreciate help to improve this: if you see an problem (typo, documentation of some function missing, inconsistency between two descriptions, etc.) in the documentaiton, you can fix it directly, and provide a patch (the ocamldoc-generated API documentation comes from the `.mli` files, which you can easily modify). We are also interested in code examples and use cases for specific Batteries function. In an ideal world with infinite manpower, we would like to have a simple useful example for each function, and more consistent code snippets to highlight common patterns of uses of a given module, feature or style. That's something that you can certainly do, even if you're not familiar with the Batteries internals. - Some useful functions are still missing. If you begin using Batteries but at some point realize that some function is missing that you would really expect in a base library (think `List.filter`; hopefully we got that one covered), please let us know. We're also interested in suggestions to improve consistency across modules : if module `Foo` has a `bar` function, but module `Foo2` which is really similar doesn't, maybe we should add `Foo2.bar`. Sometimes, a function name is not optimal, it should rather be this other name that is common to those other modules, and we may also try to fix it (but we must strive to preserve backwards-compatibility, so we're limited in what we can change). - We need your feedback. If you use Batteries but something doesn't work for you or is missing, please let us know. If you *don't* use Batteries because something doesn't work for you or is missing, please let us know. We won't be angry at you because you don't use it, and we will pay attention to (polite) harsh words. To report any problem (bug, missing feature, inconsistency, documentation problem...), you may use our issue tracker, which is simple and easy to use. https://github.com/ocaml-batteries-team/batteries-included/issues For less precise feedback, more general discussion, if you want to propose (and better, implement) more ambitious changes, or if you for some reason don't want to use our issue tracker, please send us a mail on the batteries-discuss mailing list, kindly provided by the OCamlcore Forge. batteries-discuss, lists.forge.ocamlcore.org If you want to submit patches, please discuss them on our development mailing list. We're very open to code submissions. batteries-devel, lists.forge.ocamlcore.org You will find the archives of both mailing-list on the Ocaml Forge: https://forge.ocamlcore.org/mail/?group_id=17
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Latest NewsHow newcomers can easily contribute to the OCaml BatteriesEdgar Friendly - 2011-05-10 16:14 -
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