Guided work for sage development.

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As niles pointed out, fixing bugs is a good way to start. There are a lot of tickets on the issue tracker. The ones marked with the beginner keyword are supposed to be more suitable as a starting point.

This will help you learn the development process, i.e., how to

• prepare patches using mercurial,
• use the issue tracker,
• get your code reviewed
• etc.

and gain a general familiarity with the general architecture of Sage,

• the distribution mechanism and spkgs,
• different repositories for the library and scripts,
• and the layout of the library itself.

Don't be overwhelmed by all this. Working on a couple of tickets will get you there, you don't need to read all the documentation now. :)

For projects, we still don't have a single reference point. (Putting up such a page on the wiki could be a good starting task.) Here are some relevant links:

• The list we prepared for the GSOC 2010 application (this is more programming oriented)
• Sage tasks list (mostly about the notebook and graphics)
• a todo list for symbolics (which I should really update)

Feel free to ask questions if you decide to try something out. The developer list, and now this web site, is quite helpful.

Looking forward to your first patch!

The contributor howto is required reading for any new contributor. You should at least be familiar with that howto.

Hi Hector,

It definitely is possible! Before I (and others) start listing projects, I'd like to point out that fixing bugs is another way of contributing to Sage that you may not have considered. That can be easier than writing new code, because you don't have to come up with the major ideas or do a lot of writing. But you do have to figure out how the code works, how it doesn't, and how to fix it. A few problems have come up already on this site (e.g. with numerical integration, or colormaps for certain 3d plots), and there are a good number of further bugs mentioned on the Trac site.

By doing this, you also get experience with a lot of Sage code and hence will have an easier time writing quality code when you need to do so.

(Note that this is my particular opinion, and I'm not a major contributor to Sage. I suspect there may be others who agree, but also a fair number who disagree--they can go ahead and vote this answer down!)

Another possibility: wrappers in Sage for accessing other programs. Working on something completely separate today, I came across the following note of David Joyner and David Kohel (from 2008) describing how to use GAP from within Sage for group theory computations. Near the end (section 5.6), they note that a number of GAP functions are not accessible from Sage and explain how to write a wrapper which will add this functionality to Sage.

In particular, I was looking for the LieAlgebra GAP functions, which still seem to not be in Sage.

They write:

anyone with time and a basic understanding of group theory and Python/SAGE can do this

They also provide a good warning which deserves to be more than a footnote: _be sure that the functions you add aren't already part of Sage_! Looking through the documentation will give you a good idea of what's already there, and it's recommended to send an e-mail to sage-devel before you start working on something to see if it's already in progress.