[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: process for submitting a contribution to a

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave,

My comments are in line below.


Dave Kelsey wrote:
> I have been looking to see if there is a standard eclipse project 
> process for contributing to a project but I can't seem to find it.
Contributions are made by opening a bugzilla feature request for a new 
capability and then providing an implementation of it as an attachment, 
making it clear in the comments that you are donating the contribution 
as EPL.  Contributions of significant size (> 250 lines of code) require 
review and approval by Eclipse legal, so that team considering accepting 
the contribution will need ensure that this gets done (fill out an 
IPZilla to queue it for review) before they commit the changes to CVS.
> I see some projects define themselves a process for submission but I 
> wondered if their wasn't one for all projects.
I think the above approach should work for any project.  A newsgroup 
question for the project should help clarify any details.
> For example, if someone wanted to contribute new code (which has been 
> written to the eclipse coding standards) to a project, how should
> they go about submitting this to the project ? How long should they 
> expect to wait to here if their contribution has been accepted or
> rejected, 
I suppose its reasonable to expect some type of response fairly quickly, 
but the legal review can take weeks or months because of the high 
volumes the legal folks must deal with.
> and what can be done if they feel the rejection is unfair. 
It's probably pretty hard to get beyond rejection since the EMO is not 
really in a position to force contributions down anyone's throat.  It's 
best try to work directly with the team to convince them of the merit 
and quality of the contributions.  Escalating is unlikely to produce 
desirable results since if you want to be a committer, you need the 
support of the existing team.  Keep in mind that most projects really 
don't have spare cycles to do even 1/2 of what they would like to get 
done, so dealing with contributions is an additional burden that is 
often hard to contain given the existing commitments.  The cost of long 
term support of a contribution is often an issue as well, which is of 
course mitigated by folks willing to maintain their own contribution.
> If accepted, I would assume the contributer becomes a "developer"
> so that they could be responsible for fixes and further enhancements ?
There are contributors and there are committers.  Becoming a committer 
is an earned privilege not a right and requires a consistent track 
record of quality contributions along with a vote from the existing 
committers to add you as a new one.  So in the beginning it's likely 
that you will work by providing patches that are reviewed and committed 
by existing committers on the project.
> Any information on this would be great
Contributions are a great thing and are much appreciated by most 
projects, so definitely give it a try.
> Dave