Submitting problems to the OPL

This article explains how to get started submitting problems to the NPL.

To begin, first mention on the forums that you would like to contribute problems to the NPL. You will be given a branch of the npl repository. Let us suppose it is called my_branch. The current revision of the NationalProblemLibrary will be copied into your branch so you may help with bugfixes in the NPL if you wish.

First Steps

To get started, first add a sub-directory to the NationalProblemLibrary directory on the server to hold the problems you create. We ask that your subdirectory be named after your institution. Have a look at the current subdirectories of the NationalProblemLibrary directory to get an idea of an appropriate name for your subdirectory. Supposing you decide on my_univ, then add it as follows:

svn mkdir http://svn.webwork.maa.org/npl/branches/my_branch/NationalProblemLibrary/my_univ \
-m "Creating initial my_univ directory" --username <username> --password <password>

Whenever you issue a subversion command which results in writing to the repository you must enter a log message and provide your credentials. Ordinarily, you will not use such commands to operate directly on urls as we just did. We did so in this case so that you may now decide either to checkout the NPL from your branch along with your new directories or just check out your new directory. You may wish to also checkout all or part of the NPL to help with fixing bugs.

To check out only your new directory do

svn co http://svn.webwork.maa.org/npl/branches/my_branch/NationalProblemLibrary/my_univ/

This will create a new directory my_univ in your current working directory. You may append a path to that command to control the location of your checkout. If you have already written problems that you would like to add to your branch, you can now do so by changing to the my_univ directory (or wherever your branch was checked out to) and adding those problem files with the command:

svn add /path/to/problems

Then

svn ci --m "Log message"

will upload your problem files and add them to your branch (with the existing directory structure, but under the my_univ directory).