melt-umn
A basic file describing how to get started working on Silver
We need a way to introduce new students to the logistics of developing the Silver system. My hope is that this document will be something we can tell new students to read before they start working on the Silver system, and which can be referenced for some questions that might come up as they work.
I don't know if this document belongs in the Silver repository or if it should live somewhere else.
I'm hoping everyone will read this and either add their own text or suggest concepts that need to be added. This includes people who have been working on Silver for a long time, and people who are just starting out and have their questions fresh in their minds.
A couple of notes:
- This is for people who can already write Silver code, but haven't worked on the Silver system before. Therefore it doesn't need to explain what a production is or other similarly simple concepts.
- This isn't intended to answer every question possible. We're going to get better results from asking people to read something short rather than a book, since they will remember more of a short text. Everything added should be (1) rather short and (2) generally applicable.
My vote is that this sort of documentation belongs on the website - there is already some similar (and largely duplicated) info at http://melt.cs.umn.edu/silver/dev/. But we should definitely add a link to this from the Silver README.md file.
If it does live on the website then there should be something in Git repo that points to this information on the webpage.
