[SciPy-dev] how to help scipy development?

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi,

Nils' question on how to write unit tests for odeint
raises an important point:
How to encourage contributions to scipy?

My impression is that somehow the gap between "end-users"
and developers should be made smaller.
For this it might be helpful to have (detailed)
instructions on:
- which information to provide for bug reports
  (a script which generates all the info would be great:
  scipy.__buginfo(fname="bug.txt")
  A lot of this is already available via
    from f2py2e import diagnose
    diagnose.run()
  )
- how to provide useful information when segfaults occur
  (invocation of gdb ...)
- how to add documentation to routines and how to submit these
- how to write unittests
- how to add additional wrappers to lapack (etc.)
- how to provide patches
- how to add new tools to scipy
  (see core/scipy/doc/DISTUTILS.txt
   and scipy/DEVELOPERS.txt)

Some of these points might seem trivial to expert developers,
but can be a significant barrier for newcomers.

In order to not completely bankrupt my opinion/suggestion budget  ;-)
I have added some remarks in the other thread on how one could
set up unittests (hope I got that right ...).

Best, Arnd