Developer introduction
Developers willing to contribute to the QuantLib project should subscribe to the QuantLib-dev mailing list. Such list is where current and future developments are discussed; your contribution to the discussions, even if only an occasional one, will be useful.
Should you want to get more involved, there are a number of things you can do. Possibilities include:
- contribute code to the library. Submitting a patch would be the easiest way to get your contribution into the QuantLib code tree; see the QuantLib FAQ for details. If you plan some non-trivial contribution, you may want to post a proposal to the list and discuss it before you start coding. It will be a very useful effort since it might be re-cycled as documentation when you actually implement your ideas.
- answer questions on the QuantLib-users mailing list.
- subscribe to the QuantLib-cvs mailing list and review the changes committed to the repository. You might ask questions about the change, make further suggestions, or report a bug you spotted. For this purpose, the mailing list is set up so that replies to posts go to QuantLib-dev.
- provide examples. Those are easier to write than new parts of the library, and are immensely useful to new users as they can act as documentation of library features and their usage. If you don't have the time to provide examples, you can still contribute by writing to QuantLib-dev and proposing examples to be written by whoever accepts the task.
Even if contributions were little, their cumulative effect would be a great help to improve the library. Moreover, each of the above are also ways to familiarize with the library (so that in time you'll become able to work on its internals) and to establish yourself as a trusted contributor. In the latter case, you might be granted write access to the Subversion repository tree.
Finally, we might need to ask for a disclaimer from your employer stating that your contribution can be released under the QuantLib license. Such disclaimer won't be necessary if you own the copyright of the code, but you might want to check that with your employer. An example of such disclaimer can be downloaded here, but you can write your own along the same lines if the wording doesn't suit your employer.