Apart from the online API references and the tutorial, which is covered elsewhere, this page gathers some information that might be of interest if you want to develop programs based on deal.II yourself, or if you want to contribute to the development of deal.II itself. In the latter case, we encourage you to get anonymous subversion access as described on our download page.
At present, we have the following resources available:
Makefiles: The library has a file which exports several make variables to Makefiles which include it. This information may be used to make writing Makefiles more portable and simple. The exported variables are explained in this page and we show two generic Makefiles, one for small and one for larger projects.
Writing documentation: To document the library and our application programs, we use doxygen. This page documents the basics of the format in which the documentation needs to be written in order to enable automatic documentation generation.
Porting deal.II to a new system: deal.II uses the mechanism provided by GNU autoconf. Therefore, porting to a reasonably standardized UNIX system should not be too difficult. Other systems, such as proprietary ones, might or might not work (it is possible, for example, to use Microsoft Windows); see the ReadMe file for more information on supported systems and porting.
Running the testsuite: deal.II has a testsuite that we run to make sure that our tests don't break any existing functionality. This page explains its use.
Coding conventions: We try to adhere to a set of coding conventions to ensure that the use of different parts of the library is as uniform as possible. Please read through them if you think about contributing code.
Recent changes to the library: If you want to stay informed about what is going on with the library itself, you may want to take a look at this page where we have some information about recent changes to the library.
Results of regression tests: Every night, the regression tests are run on some of our machines. The log of the results can be seen here.
Results of build tests: We also build the library each night on a variety of computers, using different compilers. The results of these builds is listed as well.