FDO Open Source - Getting Involved as a Contributor
There are three different levels of involvement for developers interested in contributing to FDO Open Source. These levels of involvement are as follows:
- Project Contributor - A Project Contributor is a developer who contributes patches, code, and/or documentation through the Project Tracker tool. Project Contributors do not have Subversion check-in access. Integration of a developer's contributions is at the discretion of the FDO Open Source Project Steering Comittee (PSC) and individuals in the Project Developer role. This is typically an iterative, communicative process.
- Project Developer - A Project Developer has full commit access to the trunk of the source tree and has a signed Contributor License Agreement on file with OSGeo. Project Developers can directly make changes to the source base of the development branch, from which the nightly builds are made. Project Developers review and accept code submitted by Project Contributors. Project Developers are elected by the PSC.
- Project Steering Committee (PSC) Member – The FDO Open Source PSC is the entity that manages the project. A PSC Member is a Project Developer or an end user of FDO that was elected to the FDO Open Source PSC due to the developer’s merit and active participation in the project. PSC Members have the right to vote for project-related decisions and the right to nominate individuals for Project Developer status. Note that most PSC members are also Project Developers, but they do not have to be.
All developers on the project start out as Project Contributors. A developer who has sent in solid, useful patches can be elevated to the Project Developer role by the Project Steering Committee (PSC). To become a Project Contributor use the Request project membership/role link at the top of the FDO Open Source project home page and request the Project Contributor role.
Join the Mailing Lists
Join the mailing lists to participate in development activities. The dev@fdo.osgeo.org is the primary channel of communication for developers working on the project. You can also sign up for the issues@fdo.osgeo.org or commits@fdo.osgeo.org mailing lists to watch development activity. If you are a registered user, click here to sign up to sign up for one or more of these lists.
To browse archives of any of the mailing lists, select the
Mailing lists link under Project tools.
Developer Resources
The following resources are available to help developers get started working on FDO Open Source:
Areas of Need
If you are looking to get involved the following aspects of FDO Open Source could use your help:
- Bug Fixes - FDO Open Source is a 1.0.0 release and as such, probably contains a bug or two that needs to be fixed.
- Platform Expansion - FDO Open Source is currently only being built and tested on Red Hat Enterprise 3 and Fedora Core 4. Updates to the code and make files to support as many Linux distributions as possible is greatly encouraged.
- Localization into new Languages - FDO Open Source is globalized and has been localized in English. Support for additional locales is very desirable.