Committer's Guide

Welcome, New Committers!

We'd like formal permission to distribute your code contributions. To make this process easy, we'll accept an emailed copy of your signed CLA.  For further instructions, see the Fedora Commons Licenses Page.

Getting Started

1. Send the following information to cwilper (at) fedora-commons.org:
   • Your fedora-commons.org userid (If you don't have one, create one here).  This is used to grant you committer-level permission on the resources hosted on our main website (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, etc)
   • Your sourceforge.net userid (If you don't have one, create one here).  The code repository is currently hosted at sourceforge.net, so we need your userid there in order to grant you write access.
   • If you're a Skype user, your Skype userid.  If you don't use Skype, please provide a phone #.
2. Sign up to the Fedora Development list.
3. Sign up to the Fedora Codewatch list using your userid@sourceforge.net address.  This is a public list that all committers subscribe to.  It's used solely for automatic notification of Subversion commits and automated test results.  It is necessary to sign up using your sourceforge.net id; commit notification will not work otherwise.  Make sure you have set up your Sourceforge account so that emails to userid@sourceforge.net are forwarded to your usual address.
4. Get familiar with compiling and testing Fedora.  Pay special attention to the section on setting up Eclipse.  Our current coding conventions are embodied by the settings you will import into Eclipse.

How We Keep In Touch

The team keeps in touch on a day-to-day basis via the development list and Skype.  We generally try to keep significant discussions on the list, but prefer Skype for higher-bandwidth discussions.

We also have bi-weekly, virtual Committer Meetings where we share what we're working on as it relates to the FCRepo project.  This also gives us a way to share what we're working on with interested members of the community (the meeting minutes are public).  Generally, committers employed by Fedora Commons are present at these meetings, and committers from other organizations may attend as their time allows.

What To Work On

While we collectively prefer the high-priority tracker items (as determined by the community and committers) to be worked on first, all contributions are appreciated.  Please only work on unclaimed items that exist in the FCREPO tracker in JIRA.  If you have verified a pre-existing bug in the Community Support tracker, please move it to the FCREPO tracker before starting the work.  If you have identified and verified a new issue, you may submit it directly to the FCREPO tracker.

Claiming an Issue

Once you've found an issue to work on, simply assign yourself as the owner in JIRA.  This lets everyone know that you plan to begin working on the issue soon.  If you find that you cannot complete an issue, please remove yourself as the owner to give other developers an opportunity to work on it.

Creating a Branch

If you're a new committer, or you're working on a substantial body of code, you should create a branch to work on it.  Here's a guide to branching in subversion if you're not already familiar.

Branches should be created as fedora/branches/fcrepo-123, where "fcrepo-123 is the JIRA id of the issue you're working on.

Sometimes it's convenient to work on multiple issues in a single development branch.  In these cases, you should make sure you've claimed each issue, and create a "Code Task" in JIRA that links to each issue via "addresses" relationship.  This helps us keep track of who is working on what, and where.