HowToContribute

For non-coders

We have some tasks that don’t require coding: they’re usually related to documentation or other minor changes.
You can see them on nocoding issues

Documentation

If you’d like to write docs and you do know the very basic of programming, you could add documentation to the code.
Coders are often lazy, and they write code which works well but is barely documented.

You could do the opposite: read their code, understand what it does, and add docstrings!

What’s a docstring?

A docstring is a string that documents something. More precisely, it can document a module, a class, a function, or a method.
Want an example/better explanation? See on wikipedia article
It’s like this:

'''
Assuming this is file mymodule.py then this string, being the
first statement in the file will become the mymodule modules
docstring when the file is imported
'''

class Myclass():
    """The class's docstring"""

    def mymethod(self):
        "The method's docstring"


def myfunction():
    "The function's docstring"

Why docstrings?

Docstrings are extremely useful for the coders that want to read the code: they also allow to produce an automatically-generated html doc.
You can browse a not-up-to-date version

I can’t understand the code. Can someone help me?

Of course we can!
First of all, discover who wrote the code that you can’t understand.
Go to emesene source then “browse” to the file you want to document. You’ll see a “history” link at the top of the file.
If you click there, you’ll see all the people that wrote that file: they are probably the right people to ask.
Want to know more? Instead of “history”, click on “blame” and you’ll see who wrote what.

Or, you can write to emesene “Dev” mailing list http://lists.emesene.org/listinfo.cgi/dev-emesene.org