Re: [Orekit Developers] Getting Started

Thank you for the reply, Luc. I have an account on the Forge (I'm HankG). I understand your workflow better now, so it looks like testing wouldn't necessarily be the best thing to do to help burn down issues. Would you rather I look at one of the older high priority "new" ones or the low priority elevation detector one?

When it comes time to start making pull requests and the like I will probably want to e-mail what steps I would take (assuming there is no step-by-step guide for that I can crib from).

I agree that stages of the propagation can be parallelized to some extent, but the actual steps are going to essentially be in a sequential fashion. I suppose a variable step size integrator with predictor/corrector methods could sample each simultaneously, but if we are relying on Apache Math for the integrator it would be on that code to be parallelized.

I suppose it would be possible to make the code thread safe but not make it parallelizeable, just in case someone accidentally adds cross-thread accesses by accident. Alternatively we could document in which methods are thread safe and which aren't in Javadoc.

Thanks again,

Hank

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:31 PM, MAISONOBE Luc <luc.maisonobe@c-s.fr> wrote:

Hi Hank,

Hank Grabowski <hank@applieddefense.com> a écrit :

As I stated in a previous e-mail, I've been following and using Orekit in
varying degrees for awhile now but just recently joined the development
team to see how I could contribute back to the project.

Thanks a lot for your interest in Orekit.

I've read over the
Orekit Governance document, all of the pages on the wiki with respect to
coding philosophy, style, et cetera. According to the website, wiki and
governance document it seems the next step would be for me to e-mail this
mailing list to begin interacting with the development team to start taking
on tasks. I have my own ideas for some things I'd like to see added to
Orekit, however before I get to that point I often find it good to get my
feet wet on a new code base by helping on existing targeted tasks.

Exchanging ideas on this mailing list is a good start. Feel free to do it, as you have started with the thread safety about propagator. I see Evan also answered to this, so you see it is an interesting topic.

When I said propagator will not be thread safe is because they are sequential by nature. However, I agree some part of the computation could be done in some cores and other parts in other cores. I also agree with Evan that some large data structure may be interesting to share between different propagators, so am ready to be convinced I am wrong and we should think more about this feature.

I have been through the issue tracker on the orekit.org site and see a few
new issues that haven't been started yet. A couple of them seem like
smaller issues that may be good to get started with.

Sure. If you see low hanging fruits, you can grab them, they can be interesting to get used to our way to develop. If you don't have an account on the forge, set up one so you can attach files and patches to the issue tracker.

I see many resolved
issues that look like they have been successfully submitted. I do not know
your issue workflow, but in traditional work flows I'm experienced with
independent verification is necessary to move an issue from "resolved" to
"closed".

We usually wait until the official release of the version wehre the fix is included before closing the issue.

I'd be happy to help burn down those issues by starting the
process of validating their completeness. Since this would be my first
contribution I'd be happy to coordinate either effort with one of the
primary developers (based on my reading of the repository stats that would
be either Luc Maisonobe, Pascal Parraud or Fabien Maussion).

Fabien Maussion have left the project some years ago, after his internship ended. The other current developers are Evan Ward and Thomas Neidhart.

Thanks for all of your efforts to date. I look forward to contributing.

Thanks again for you proposal, we are happy to have new contributors.

best regards,
Luc

Thanks,

Hank

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