[Geany-Users] Looking to contribute

[Matthew Brush]

On 2015-12-13 3:55 PM, Matthew Brush wrote:
> 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
>

And of course the documentation, which among other useful details, 
contains some easy to miss links at the top which explain how lexers work:

http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html

I found the "Beginner's Guide to lexing and folding" one quite good.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush