Contributing to JacORB

We encourage you, the users, to contribute to JacORB. This is the great advantage of a free software project: Everybody can see the code, everybody can improve it, and everybody benefits from everybody else's contributions.

Here are some guidelines that help us to make this work smoothly:

• Your first point of contact should be the jacorb-developer mailing list or the bugzilla bug tracking system. Use the mailing list if you want to discuss an issue, propose a new feature, and the like. Use the bug tracking system to check for known bugs, or to report a bug. For small enhancements and feature requests (which are not actually bug fixes), we also keep records in bugzilla.
• If you already have a patch, all the better. You can attach it to the bugzilla report, so that we can have a look at it and install it into the main code base. (Please attach your patch to the report, rather than pasting it into the comment window, which would likely corrupt it.)

  Some notes on the format of patches:

  • They should be supplied as a unified diff (diff -u format). Diff is a Unix utility, Windows versions exist. "Unified format" is preferred, because that allows us to see immediately what your changes are, just by looking at the diff.
  • Make the diff relative to latest released version of JacORB. If you want to get more involved, you should hook up to our CVS repository, so that you can make diffs relative to the current CVS version. Diffing is actually much easier once you're hooked up to CVS. See www.jacorb.org/download.html for instructions on anonymous (read-only) CVS access.
  • When you change code, do NOT add comments like "changed by xyz, 2005-x-y". If everybody did that, the code would become littered with such comments over time. CVS does a much better job of recording the change history of files.
  • Please provide a ChangeLog entry along with your patch, following the format in src/org/jacorb/ChangeLog. The entry should briefly describe what you changed, not so much why you changed it. If you feel you should explain the why of a patch, please do so in a comment inside the source code.
• For some general coding guidelines, see the file doc/Coding.txt in the JacORB tree (this is only available via CVS, not in the released code base).
• If your patches get larger than about a dozen lines of code, we need you to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that allows us to use your code under a free software license. This is to protect the legal status of JacORB, so that everybody who's using it can be sure they won't be encumbered by law suits at some point. You can find the CLA forms under www.jacorb.org/licenses (jacorb-cla.txt and jacorb-corporate-cla.txt).
• If you supply patches and enhancements regularly, and if you would like to take some degree of responsibility for the code you contribute, we will ultimately give you write access to the CVS repository, and welcome you on the internal team mailing list. You will then be a core team member just like we are, and eligible for the same eternal fame.