Making contributions to the Demeter project

Have you benefited by IFEFFIT and its community of friendly people? Ever thought about doing something to contribute to the community? This document offers some suggestion for things you can do to help the IFEFFIT community.

Day to day contributions

  • Answer a question on the mailing list.
  • Report a bug or make a suggestion for improving the codes. Do this on the Ifeffit mailing list or at DEMETER's issues page

Documentation contributions

  • Write a web page explaining something about XAS.
  • Measure a library of reference materials for some element and share an ATHENA project file containing the processed data.
  • Explain a data analysis problem in the form of a series of annotated project files.
  • Make a video explaining how to do something with the software.
  • Give a lecture at an XAS training course. Post your presentation and any relevant data on http://xafs.org or elsewhere.

Packaging contributions

  • Make, support, and keep up-to-date installer packages for Debian based systems, Red Hat based systems, other Linux distributions, or BSD.
  • Improve the Windows installer: add more XAS-related Start menu options, add more perl-related Start menu options, write a better README file for display upon installation, figure out how to dispense with the useless dosbox, etc.
  • As a Windows updater, could something be done with git and automating the build process?
  • Desktop functionality for Windows, Mac, KDE, GNOME/Unity, etc. By this I mean things like looking inside an ATHENA project file (a la dlsprj) and displaying that information in the file manager. Or showing an image of the most recent fit when an ARTEMIS project file is selected.

Programming contributions

  • Identify and fix a bug in the codes. Submit a patch to Bruce or issue a pull request at https://github.com/bruceravel/demeter
  • Write a file type plugin for the weird data files from some weird beamline.
  • Write an interesting and novel program using DEMETER and share it with the world.
  • I have long wanted to integrate OpenBabel into ARTEMIS. OpenBabel is a framework for converting between molecule file formats. The feff.inp format could be integrated into OpenBabel by writing a bit of C++. With FEFF integrated into OpenBabel, DEMETER could use OpenBabel's Perl interface. This means that any molecule format could be imported into ARTEMIS and used as the basis of a FEFF calculation. Writing the OpenBabel interface and contributing it the OpenBabel project would be a most splendid contribution to Demeter while at the same time opening up FEFF support to the many projects that use OpenBabel.


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