How do I get started with the development of Cura?

[sphereinabox 0]

I'm trying to build the latest version of Cura to see about poking at the code to add some features or try some things it doesn't have yet and there isn't an introduction that says "development happens in this branch on this repo, follow these instructions to build" that I've found that work.

I'm on OS X 10.11

The dev link on https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software goes to github http://github.com/Ultimaker where I naively assumed the master branch of the Cura repository was the place to start. I just need Cura, Uranium, CuraEngine, google protobuf, and libArcus, and obviously XCode.

... or this neat thing called cura-build which has super-simple instructions I can follow that don't work because google protobuf didn't compile, python3 build didn't include setuptools, python3 didn't compile with ssl and when I tried on linux mint it couldn't find python 3.4.3 to satisfy requirement for python 3.4.0 or higher which might be a bug in CMake 2.8 fixed in 3.0.

Am I looking at the wrong branch? Should I be looking at the 15.10 branch instead of Master?

What even is the 2.1 branch? The cura-build repo there has more complete build instructions (it mentions gcc and ssl) but it looks like I made the wrong decision choosing macports instead of homebrew on this mac.

Where should I report problems and ask for help?

[This has been super frustrating]

[nallath 1,123]

We have a cura-dev irc chat on freenode. Usually a few people are online there.

The numbering is a bit confusing at the moment. We used to have year.month.version for versioning, but this confused people as we started with a 'new' cura. That version is now called 2.1.

Master is the branch that we develop new features on, feature branches are there for bug fixes (so now most of the work is done on 2.1)

You do need cmake 3.0 for everything to work correctly.

If you have any more questions (either regarding how to get started or in depth code stuff) drop me a PM.