Introduction
The Cactus Project is an Open Source
volunteer project under the auspices of the
Apache Software Foundation (ASF),
and, in harmony with the Apache webserver itself, it is released under
a very open license.
This means there are many ways to contribute to the project
(coding, documenting, answering questions,
proposing ideas, reporting bugs, suggesting bug-fixes, etc..).
To begin with, we suggest you to subscribe to the
Cactus mailing list.
Then you can download the latest Cactus
release or checkout the latest code from
SVN.
Last, you can check the todo list and
jump in.
Help Wanted Here
The rest of this document is mainly about
contributing new or improved code and/or documentation, but we would also
be glad to have extra help in any of the following areas:
-
Answering questions on the
Cactus mailing list;
there is often a problem of having too many questioners and not enough
experts to respond to all the questions.
-
Testing Cactus (especially its less-frequently-used features) on
various configurations and reporting back.
-
Debugging - producing reproducable test cases and/or finding causes of
bugs (bugs can be found in the
bug database).
-
Specifying/analysing/designing new features for Cactus (If you wish to
get involved with this, please join the
Cactus mailing list,
install and try out Cactus and read some of the mailing list archives.
In addition, please have a look at the
Goals page which gives a vision of
where Cactus is heading and provide some high level todos.
-
Providing automated Ant scripts for new servlet engines/application
servers. The list of supported servers can found in the
features list.
-
... and there is just one other thing - don't forget to tell everyone
who asks how great Cactus is! ;-)
The more people that know about and start to use Cactus, the larger the
pool of potential contributors there will be.
Thank you very much.
Contributions of Code and Documentation
We are starting to use an informal system for accepting contributions to
Cactus. The process varies depending on whether the contribution is a
modification (i.e. patch) or a fairly standalone item, and whether you
have commit access (committers have been granted access by a vote of
confidence, so they are assumed to be trustworthy enough
to make changes directly in SVN. If you submit many good patches, you
may be nominated as a committer yourself!)
If your contribution requires changing more than a few lines of Cactus
(code or documentation), then it counts as a
patch. If
you have a patch and would like to see it incorporated into the Cactus
distribution, take note of the Licensing Requirements listed below, and
then create a
JIRA issue and attach
to it a unified diff (
svn patch) of your changes against
the latest SVN version of the code (SVN HEAD).
Licensing Requirements for the Cactus Distribution
To avoid legal problems, the Apache Project Management Committee (PMC)
have agreed on a policy for under what licensing code can be accepted
into Apache projects:
-
Source code files must be under the Apache license and must have
copyright assigned to the Apache Software Foundation.
-
Jar files need only be released under a license that permits free
redistribution and does not cover new files added to the jar/library
(so the GPL and LGPL are not allowed, but MPL and Apache licenses are,
for example).
By submitting a patch, you signify your understanding and
acceptance of these conditions - like most open source projects
, we do not have the resources nor the inclination to obtain signed
statements from all contributors!
