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- Do not implement large blocks of artifacts (code, etc) on your own and then contribute them to OFBiz.
- If you have a large block of code to contribute we can work with you on that, but it requires a different review and legal vetting process than normal contributions, as described on http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/index.html.
- Instead develop and contribute as you go. This means develop as you would normally, but interact with the OFBiz community through mailing lists and contribute patches regularly. # If you are do not have a committer on your team this can slow down development, so do what you can to "sell" one of the committers on your project and get an ally on the committing team to regularly review and commit your patches. Note that if you let us know in advance that you are planning a larger effort of this nature, we can perhaps find a volunteer beforehand to work with you on this.
- Just please remember that there is no paid staff on OFBiz, all are volunteers. You may see your patch sit in Jira for a long time while committers work on other things. This usually happens because a committer is working on a priority for the project that has been a problem for a while, or on a paid contract in order to survive and to be able to continue helping with OFBiz.
- It might be tempting to run your effort without getting an OFBiz committer involved, but keep in mind that committers can help you with technical, business, and legal concerns either on their own or through collaboration with others in the project on in the ASF more generally.
How
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If you're interested in becoming a committer, that's great! We would love to have you and the whole community will really appreciate your help.
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to
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For more information and to get started see the Committers Roles and Responsibilities page.
How to Send in Your Contributions
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This must always be done before submitting a patch otherwise the patch just won't work. If your local sandbox is checked out from a separate SVN repository following the vendor branch pattern instead of directly from the OFBiz SVN, then you should do a vendor branch update, merge, and then local update in your sandbox before doing the svn diff to create the patch.
Next upload your patch file to your JIRA issue.
Finally, if there are several patch files already on an issue, please write a comment about which file should be used.
Why is it Taking So Long to Get My Patch In?
The first thing to remember is that in order for something to get done, both the means and the ways There are no paid OFBiz committers, everyone works on a volunteer basis. This is a natural side effect of OFBiz being a community-driven project rather than "commercial open source".
When someone submits a patch they are asking for someone in the group of committers to do something for free. Sometimes because of the volume of patches it is overlooked and then with a constant stream of new issues, complaints, questions, etc it may be a long time (if ever) before someone gets back to it. Most unfortunately there aren't any committers that can work on contributing to OFBiz full-time because so far there are no committers that don't need to also earn a living. Most committers work with OFBiz in their day job, and because of the size and complexity of the project so far that seems to be the only way someone even can consistently contribute to OFBiz. That doesn't mean they are paid to work on your issue though, unless you and they get lucky and it happens to be related to a paid client objective.
If you REALLY want your patch in, you can get it in. If you want it in, your job is to help the committers get it in. You can recruit others on the mailing lists to review and test your patch. This is really important, because OFBiz is fairly complex and many patches break rule #1, which is in short, "first do no harm". In other words, do break stuff that already exists that other people implemented, and that other people are using.
There is also another option... as mentioned above OFBiz is unfunded and every committer has an employer of some sort, often a handful of clients. This would explain why things are getting committed all the time, even though sometimes the volume of patches getting reviewed and committed is pretty low. If committers are lucky then they get to work on stuff that goes back into OFBiz, and that is ONLY reason that most of the functionality in OFBiz exists at all, especially in the applications (most of the framework, on the other hand, was not ever sponsored). Some people see this as unfair. Others see it as a great stroke of luck that they can take advantage of.
If this isn't working for you, then consider getting more involved with OFBiz or somehow making it possible for others to get more involved with OFBiz. There are many ways you can help, even without becoming a committer yourself. There are the exact same things you can do in order to become a committer if you do enough of them, but of course you can do all of these without any longer term commitment or hoops to jump through. You don't even have to get a committer or PMC member to do anything in order to do these things!
- Subscribe to the dev mailing list, try to read the majority of the messages, and participate in discussions there
- Review and comment on issues in the Jira issue tracker
- Apply patches from Jira locally and test them and comment on the results
- Create patches to fix issues reported in Jira
- Get to know OFBiz and submit patches to fix problems or annoyances you find
- Follow all of the rest of the advice in this document
How Do I Become a Committer Myself?
If you're interested in becoming a committer, that's great! We would love to have you and the whole community will really appreciate your help.
Being a committer can be a great help to your employer and/or clients. It can also be a great asset in your personal and career growth. There is a guarantee that in the course of your activities you will learn and grow. You'll learn about building enterprise applications, both the technical and business sides of them. You'll also learn a lot about working with other people, especially working with other people remotely.
For more information and to get started see the Committers Roles and Responsibilities page.