It’ll be another busy week next week: I have six reviews scheduled. More on that in a bit…
The decentralized nature of Git makes it so that it’s no longer possible to expect that somebody who has found your source code repository will easily find the corresponding project and sort out how to contribute without assistance. In short, if you value contributions, then you really need to have a contribution guide baked right into your repository. The use of a CONTRIBUTING file, located in the root of every Git repository is becoming the standard way of helping potential contributors be successful. As Denis stated, “every project I’ve interacted with in the Linux world has a README, INSTALL and/or CONTRIBUTING file… or contributing instructions somewhere in any of those.”
I decided to put some serious energy into Bug 389644, which is concerned with providing some help to get projects to create a contribution guide. I took it one step further, and implemented an automatic contribution guide generator. The generator creates what I believe is a reasonable default minimal CONTRIBUTING file. That reasonable default can and should be extended to include, for example, more detailed how-to-contribute documentation, or a link to a more comprehensive document.
Information about the generator is in the Eclipsepedia wiki. I don’t currently have it linked to anything yet, but I think it will find a natural home in the PMI. For now, you can use this URL:
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/tools/default_contributing_file.php?id=project-id
Where project-id is the Eclipse project id (e.g. ‘technology.jgit’). The results produced by the generator are only as good as the information provided by the project team in the PMI.
Here’s the important bit: All Eclipse projects are henceforth required to have a contribution guide in every source code repository before any release review will be scheduled. The guide does not have to be exactly as the generator provides and I’m not particularly hung up on the naming convention: I just need to be able to quickly find and understand it.
And now to the reviews…
This week, we have two project creation reviews:
The scope of RCP Testing Tool is to provide a best-possible support for testing of Eclipse-based applications.
Californium (Cf) CoAP Framework Creation Review
Californium (Cf) provides an implementation of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) standard.
We have two release reviews:
And, finally, two termination reviews:
The Eclipse Project Incubator termination isn’t as scary as it sounds. The two incubators included in this termination aren’t being used; all incubation in the Eclipse project occurs in the e4 project. UFaceKit is being terminated because all development on the project has halted.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know!
