How to start contributing · brlcad

Stream: brlcad

Topic: How to start contributing

Daniel Rossberg (Nov 16 2024 at 15:15):

Hello @Hector Serrano, @Shreya Baid, @Indranil Saha, @Gufran Khan, and everybody else interested in contributing to BRL-CAD, whether GSoC related or not.

The first thing you should do is learning about BRL-CAD, what it is and how it works. I.e.

Install the main programs. You can find installation binaries for Windows among the releases https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad/releases. If you don't want to start with Windows, you have to compile the programs by yourself first. For doing this, see next section.
The installation contains a huge amount of programs. Most of them are small command line tools. You should look at our old but still heavily used GUI mged and the more modern GUI archer.
With both, you can go through the tutorial https://brlcad.org/w/images/c/cf/Introduction_to_MGED.pdf.
Gain an overview of the existing documentation at https://brlcad.org/wiki/Main_Page.

The next step would be compiling the programs from sources. This is, of course, necessary for contributing to the programs in our main repository. But, even if you are interested in web-programming, like our Online Geometry Viewer or writing a Python API (where you need an installed BRL-CAD only), without being able to compile it by yourself, you cannot benefit from latest improvements. Therefore

Download the source code from https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad.
Compile, and install the programs (see https://brlcad.org/wiki/Compiling).

Links with ideas for small contributions:

Last, some remarks regarding GSoC:

GSoC is not a simple paid programming. You won't get a list of functions you have to implement. Rather, you have to propose your own short (approx. 3 months) software development project. I.e., you are your own project manager. Of course, you get help making the plan and carrying it out.
This are some ideas for GSoC projects. GSoC 2025 however hasn't started and we haven't decided about participation, priorities, etc. yet.

Daniel Rossberg (Feb 22 2025 at 15:45):

@siddharth said:

how to contribute

The first thing you should do is learning about BRL-CAD, what it is and how it works. I.e.

Install the main programs. Most of them are small command line tools. You should look at our old but still heavily used GUI mged and the more modern GUI archer.
With both, you can go through the tutorial.
Gain an overview of the existing documentation.

The next step is compiling the programs from sources. Therefore

Download the source code from https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad.
Compile, and install the programs.

At last, some links with ideas for small contributions:

Last updated: Apr 26 2025 at 00:51 UTC