The Mnemosyne Project

We are currently working on Mnemosyne 2.0, a major new feature release. It is still a work in progress, but it has advanced sufficiently far for other developers to join.

For a list of tasks you can help out with, see our blueprints page. This list will evolve over time, so be sure to check back occasionally.

We use Launchpad to coordinate the development. It's good to first take the tour of Launchpad (on its front page) to get a feel for how this works.

When you've picked a project you want to work on, post a message on the developer mailing list. Next, install the bazaar version control tool, get familiar with it, and create your own local copy of the Mnemosyne code by typing bzr branch lp:mnemosyne-proj. This will check out the main line of development. For an overview of the different other branches, see our Launchpad code page.

Then, start hacking on the code to your heart's content, occasionally saving your progress by doing a bzr commit.

It is important to also publish your changes to the world, so that you can get feedback on your work. To do this, sign up for an account on Launchpad, register your SSH key there, and type bzr push bzr+ssh://john.doe@bazaar.launchpad.net/~john.doe/mnemosyne-proj/mybranchname, replacing john.doe with your own Launchpad username, and mybranchname with the name of the branch you are working on. To keep your published version up to date, you can at later times suffice with the shorter version bzr push.

It is also important to periodically pull in the changes that the other developers make on the trunk (use bzr merge lp:mnemosyne-proj), so that it becomes easier to merge your work later.

Once you think your work is ready for merging into the mainline, a developer will review your code, and if it's approved it will be merged.

To get an overview of how all the different bits of the library fit together, see the documentation in the code at mnemosyne/mnemosyne/libmnemosyne/docs/build/html/index.html

In order to keep the code looking uniform, please following the standard Python style guides PEP8 and PEP257.

To start working on Mnemosyne, you need the following software: easyinstall, virtualenv, Qt4.4 or later, PyQt4.4 or later, matplotlib, including their dependencies. All of these can be located by a simple Google search. (On Ubuntu, you also need to install the following development packages: python-qt4-dev python-sip4 python-sip4-dev pyqt4-dev-tools qt4-designer python-matplotlib python-qt4-phonon)

The top level makefile contains some machinery to make it easier to test Mnemosyne 2.0 while keeping your current 1.x install intact. The first time, type make setup to set up a virtual environment in which to install Mnemosyne. After that, typing make will generate the needed auxialiary files, install Mnemosyne into the virtual environment, and start it using a separate datadir.