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The Cocoon Project is an Open Source
volunteer project under the auspices of the
Apache Software Foundation (ASF),
and, in harmony with the Apache webserver itself, it is released under
a very open license.
This means there are many ways to contribute to the project - either
with direct participation (coding, documenting, answering questions,
proposing ideas, reporting bugs, suggesting bug-fixes, etc..) or by resource
donations (money, time, publicity, hardware, software, conference
presentations, speeches, etc...).
To begin with, we suggest you to subscribe to the
Cocoon mailing lists
(follow the link for information on how to subscribe and to access the mail
list archives), to checkout the
latest and greatest code (which you find in the xml-cocoon module in
the xml.apache.org CVS code repository, or from the
CVS snapshots),
control the todo
list and jump in. Document writers are usually the most wanted people so if
you like to help but you're not familiar with the innermost technical details, don't worry:
we have work for you!
For financial support in particular, the Cocoon Project and the ASF in general
is closely collaborating with the Collab.net
SourceXchange program that will provide a legal, solid and
well-established resource for money collecting to fund software production
under the open source flag. Please, feel free to contact directly
the ASF President and Collab.net co-founder Brian
Behlendorf for more information on how to contribute financially to the
advancement of this project.
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The rest of this document is mainly about
contributing new or improved code and/or documentation, but we would also be glad to have
extra help in any of the following areas:
- Answering questions on the
cocoon-users mailing list - there is often a problem of
having too many questioners and not enough experts to respond to all the questions.
- Testing Cocoon (especially its less-frequently-used features) on various configurations
and reporting back.
- Debugging - producing reproducable test cases and/or finding causes of bugs (at the time of
writing, some known bugs are informally listed on To Do, but
eventually a bug database should be made available on the Apache site).
- Specifying/analysing/designing new features for Cocoon 2 - and beyond. (If you wish to get involved
with this, please join
cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org
(you may also want to join xsp-dev@xml.apache.org ), install and try out Cocoon 2
and read some of the mail archives.
You should have a strong "fluency" in XML technologies, Java and a basic understanding of
the Cocoon 2 architecture - don't just say "it should have XYZ" without reading anything first -
because chances are, someone's already thought of that feature!)
- Packaging easy-to-install packages (such as RPMs) for the myriad of possible configurations out
there. (The Cocoon project does not maintain anything but the basic
.zip and
.tar.gz packages, but anyone is welcome to build their own specific packages and
announce them on cocoon-users )
- ... and there is just one other thing - don't forget to tell everyone who asks how great Cocoon is! ;-)
The more people that know about and start to use Cocoon, the larger the pool of
potential contributors there will be
- so, please, help us by placing the cocoon logo somewhere in your
site to indicate that you are using and supporting the Cocoon Project.
Thank you very much.
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We are starting to use an informal system for accepting contributions to Cocoon.
The process varies depending on whether the contribution is a modification (i.e. patch)
or a fairly standalone item, and whether you have commit access (committers have been
granted access by a vote of confidence, so they are assumed to be trustworthy enough
to make changes directly in CVS. If you submit many good patches, you may be
nominated as a committer yourself!)
If your contribution requires changing more than a few lines of Cocoon (code or
documentation), then it counts as a patch. If you have a patch and
would like to see it incorporated into the Cocoon distribution, take note of the Licensing
Requirements listed below, and then read the Patch management
page for more information.
Otherwise (that is, if it does not require patching or you are not particularly interested in
having it included in the main distribution), your code and/or
documentation can be listed on the
Third-Party Contributions page.
The rationale for this split is that core patches may fix important issues, and may
require timely attention if they are not to go
out-of-date and become useless, but other contributions can simply be downloaded and
applied by users who wish to use them.
A typical contribution (not a patch) may go through the following stages:
- Posted to cocoon-users with a URL to download it from.
- Listed on 3rdparty.html by a maintainer. [No requirements, other than relevance (at the moment).]
- Inclusion into the
contrib directory,
which is for 3rd-party contributions that have been tested, but are not necessarily
mature enough or general enough for the main distribution. [Must be tested at least as
specified below. See also Licensing Requirements below.]
- Inclusion into the main distribution. [Committers must be confident that it should work properly in
most/all environments, it must be documented as appropriate, and it must be considered sufficiently
useful and general to go into Cocoon. See also Licensing Requirements below].
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