Contributing

Contributions are welcome when they keep the repository educational, reproducible, and Octave-compatible.

Development Setup

Install GNU Octave, then run:

make validate

Build the Octave package archive with:

make package

Check generated website links with:

make check-links

If make is unavailable, run the same checks directly:

octave --no-gui tests/run_all_tests.m
octave --no-gui examples/run_text_examples.m
octave --no-gui examples/generate_simulation_report.m
octave --no-gui examples/check_generated_images.m

Code Guidelines

• Keep new MATLAB/Octave code compatible with GNU Octave.
• Prefer small functions in src/ with focused examples in examples/.
• Add or update tests when changing decoder, recovery, or simulation behavior.
• Keep Monte Carlo defaults small enough for local and CI runs.
• Document modeling assumptions clearly, especially for surface-code and circuit-level approximations.
• Update DESCRIPTION, INDEX, and src/qec_version.m together when changing the package version.

Generated Outputs

Plots are written to images/. The compact report is generated at docs/SIMULATION_REPORT.md.

Surface-3 sweep caches live under cache/, which is ignored by git.

Octave package archives are built under dist/, which is ignored by git.