Participate!

deal.II is a community project that lives by the participation of its members — i.e., including you! If you want to join us in this, here are a few ways to give back to the project:

  • All development happens in the open in our GitHub repository. You can participate in the development in many different ways.
  • Subscribe to the mailing list and help by answering questions by others to which you happen to know the answers.
  • Suggest improvements to the documentation. Most documentation is written by those who already know what a function or class does, and may miss crucial pieces those still learning it may find necessary. If you have understood something that was awkwardly or incompletely documented, re-write this documentation and submit the new text for inclusion.
  • Report any bugs you may find.
  • Download the sources from our github repository. See the download page for instructions.
  • Contribute to the project in one of many ways! An excellent overview of some steps is given here. If you're interested in submitting patches but don't know how, see also video lecture 32.8.
  • Most people contribute patches that add functionality they need, or fix bugs they run into. But there may be easier ways to start. Some easy enhancement projects are described on the list of open issues (and in particular in our list of "starter projects"). There is also a list of ideas for larger projects. Even simpler, most projects based on deal.II have functions that, with small modifications, may be of general interest. If you have any functions you think others might find useful, please offer them for inclusion into the library!