[Paparazzi-devel] Contributing to the Paparazzi project - Beginner questions

[Markus Bina]

Hi!

Although I'm a beginner when it comes to RC planes (I flew quadrocopters 
before; using ardupilot) and paparazzi
I would like to contribute/help out (as a hobby).
Thus I have a few (stupid?) questions and some suggestions.

First I'd like to start by helping out with the wiki first 
(http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Contributing#Wiki) and see how it goes 
from there.

Before actually editing something, I have a few questions about the wiki 
(http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/):
-) On some pages (eg. 
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Airframe_Configuration) the XML is in 
"boxes" with syntax highlighting
   and on some there is no syntax highlighting (eg. 
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Failsafe).
   Is there a particular reason for this?
-) On some, non board/schematic specific, pages the information is 
inconsistent*/only valid for a certain board (eg Twog or Lisa),
   eg. http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Module/Airspeed_ETS (no info for 
eg. Lisa M v2.0).
   Am I allowed to change this/add information for other boards?
-) The "beginner pages" are not easy to find and the tutorials seem to 
be incomplete*.
    Is there a plan to add more extensive tutorials (like the ones you 
can find on the transition robotics wiki)?
    I might want to provide a tutorial (share my experience), what are 
the rules/recommendations for doing so?
    Shall I extend/finish the existing tutorials?
-) Some pages do not have a TOC. Is it ok if I add TOCs?

General question:
-) I was unable to find a complete and compact documentation/list of all 
the XML-tags including their "effects".
   Is there such a list?
   If not: I would like to help to write such a list. However, with 
constantly changing code (autopilot code, etc.), the
   tags and names (attributes/tags/values, which are translated into 
macros, right?) will imho constantly change too, which in turn
   requires code developers to update said list everytime they add or 
change options for users (tag, attribute, ...).
   Can anyone think of a (semi-)automated way to generate such a list 
(one html page, maybe)?
   Can doxygen do that somehow?

About the paparazzi source code (available through github):
-) Upon installing the paparazzi-software package, I noticed that 
paparazzi has quite a lot of dependencies of which most look to be 
redundant.
    Less dependencies, imho ease code testing, maintenance and 
installation.
    Are there any plans to reduce the number of dependencies and 
external libraries?

Thanks for reading my long mail. :)

Cheers,
  Markus

* at least for a rookie like me ;)