[Geany-Users] Looking to contribute

[Matthew Brush]

On 2015-12-13 3:47 PM, Ray Andrews wrote:
> On 12/13/2015 02:45 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
>> Scintilla is a project maintained by one person in their own time.
>
> Just one guy?  I subscribed to their list, and there seemed to be
> several people involved.
>

One guy that makes commits (usually). Most of the lexers were 
contributed and maintained by other people, but all changes usually go 
through Neil.

>> Like all open source projects, he will accept well written additions
>> or changes contributed by others, but he is unable to perform
>> significant maintenance on all the contributed lexers by himself, due
>> to time and the detailed knowledge of the language needed. He is
>> usually good about stating that he won't be able to work on it
>> himself. For contributed lexers the individual maintainers may help if
>> they have time and knowledge of what is to be changed (and this was
>> the problem with the zsh changes, nobody could define them), although
>> some of the maintainers have also disappeared and no longer
>> contribute. So for changes to Scintilla, yes it is usually necessary
>> to do it yourself, and if its done well it is probably likely to be
>> accepted, despite Neils occasionally voiced concerns about long term
>> maintainability and utility of all those lexers. Cheers Lex
>
> Well, if I knew where to start I'd certainly be willing.  As I said to
> them, a 99% accuracy should be easy even if there is some obscure
> exception and 100% should be achievable with work.  One of the people on
> their list said he might look into it over the holidays, and that's
> where it lies at the moment.
>

"where to start" is a bit vague, but reading the source code is a pretty 
good starting point[0]:

http://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/code/ci/default/tree/lexers/LexBash.cxx

You can also ask specific questions on scintilla-interest mailing list 
or even on Geany's development mailing list.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

[0]: assuming you know C++, otherwise a good starting point would be 
learning C++ :)