Developer's Basics

Want to become a developer? Want to use development versions of the toolbox? The following points may be important for you, may help me fixing bugs and improving the toolbox, and saving both of us time.

There is a bit of infrastructure surrounding the toolbox:

• Version control system (git)
  • Get the newest version of the toolbox.
• Bug tracker (BugZilla)
  • Report bugs, review bug reports.
• Homepage (you're there)
  • Get further information about the toolbox.

Besides that, the toolbox itself is documented, especially the GUI. Every GUI window has its own help window explaining the functions in some detail. Most probably, this help that is directly included in the toolbox is the most current version.

The first steps if you want to become a developer or just use the current development versions of the toolbox are:

1. Get the latest version of the toolbox.
   You can find the link to that on the bottom of the development page.
2. Create an account in the bug tracker.
   Go to the BugZilla page and create a new user. Please, add your real name to the respective field, otherwise it may happen that you get blocked until we got in contact.
3. Install the toolbox on your system.

If you, beyond using the latest development versions of the toolbox, want to contribute code to the toolbox, please familiarise yourself with the basic concepts and ideas of the toolbox. Furthermore, if you want to write your own GUIs, make sure you have looked at the developers' resources for GUI programming. The same is true for writing submodules for the toolbox.

This software is still under development, and therefore you may encounter bugs rather frequently. To help improve its usability, please report every bug if any possible.

It is highly recommended to use the BugZilla bug reporter to report bugs. Advantages are:

• All bug reports are centrally stored and handled.
• You will receive updates if the status of a bug changes.
• You and others can lookup whether a certain bug has already been reported and what the status of this bug is.
• You save me time that I can spend fixing the bug rather than having to deal with manual bug reports sent via email.

A bug report helper has been added that displays a window in case the GUI detects an internal error (exception). This window contains all the necessary information that shall go into an email to the toolbox author.

If this window shows up, simply follow the instructions, and please, SAVE your data immediately afterwards.

If you encounter an error/bug, but the bug report helper doesn't appear, please file the bug manually using the BugZilla forms.

The miminum information that you should include into a bug report using BugZilla:

• A short description
• Your Matlab™ version
• Your operating system
• The toolbox version

Matlab™ version, operating system and toolbox version can be selected within the BugZilla forms.

You may as well choose an importance of the bug. But be realistic. Of course, if it prevents you from using the toolbox, this is surely either “critical” or “blocker”, but don't use such labels without good reason.

Suppose that you know about git, and that you're interested to contribute to the toolbox in more than the usual way and therefore are interested in getting access to the git repository with the source code.

If that is the case, please contact the toolbox author so that we can sort out things directly.