The commons is a little bit different from other jakarta projects. It's an assembly of
components each with it's own little community of users, developers and committers.
Of course, there is some overlap between components and an espirit de corps
but the commons is a big, busy Bazaar.
So, one FAQ is - I'd like to help but how do I volunteer?
Hopefully people asking this have already browsed through the
general jakarta documentation but are having troubles getting a grip on the commons.
Luckily Craig R. McClanahan posted an excellent answer to this very question to
the commons-dev list - so why not get involved?!
Prabhat Kumar wrote:
>I was wondering if I could contribute in any way towards this project. I am
>a Java programmer of moderate ability and use Struts, Ant and Log4j at my
>daytime job. We are currently looking at using the commons pool package at
>work.
>
>The "How do I contribute" section on the commons page says that you need any
>contributions. So let me know.
>
>Prabhat.
Hello Prabhat,
The best way to contribute is to identify for yourself things that you
think are broken, or could be improved, and then propose a patch. A
couple of ways to identify possible candidates:
* Have you used a commons API, and wished it would do something
a little more? or a little different? In open source circles,
people often get involved initially by "scratching your own itch"
as the saying goes.
* Have you called up the bug reports >http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/<
for the Commons project, and seen any bugs that you can create a
patch for?
* Have you checked your favorite package's TODO or STATUS files
for things that have already been thought about, but just are
not done yet?
Craig
