Thanks for the info Marcel. We use Eclipse 3.5.x (actually Springsource Tool Suite, built on Eclipse) and use Maven for our builds. I also do a lot of SVN stuff at the commandline (usually admin-type stuff) and use Tortoise SVN quite a bit for browsing and such. We typically use Windows dev boxes and Linux (Ubuntu) servers at work, and at home (where I do most of my work actually) I alternate between Windows and Linux. So between all that I hopefully have the tools for the job.
I see there's a "Create Patch" menu item in Eclipse, but I've never used it. I'll create a dummy project and play around with that to get familiar with it. I'll also take a look at the Apache info to get familiar. We've used Apache and other open-source tools for years and benefitted greatly from them. It's exciting to have a chance to give something back. On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Marcel Offermans < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello Mike, > > On May 31, 2010, at 23:36 , Mike Haney wrote: > > > Hello. I have been designing a provisioning and licensing system for our > > suite of applications, and I came across ACE which it looks like will > give > > me a big headstart in implementing these features. > > Great, we're looking forward in collaborating on this. > > > However, I know there > > are some requirements that won't be fulfilled by ACE. For example, we > will > > need to be able to integrate with a third party licensing system, > > Actually, we did keep that in mind when developing ACE. If you have a third > party licensing system that basically can determine which "licenses" (or > distributions as we call them in ACE) are licensed to which "targets" then > there is an API for feeding that information programmatically to the system. > > > and also > > be able to deploy user-specific configuration data either as property > files > > or nodes in a JCR repository. > > For configuration data we currently implement the Auto Config spec, which > builds on Deployment Admin and Configuration Admin. On top of that we have > some highly experimental templating system that allows you to have an > artifact with certain parameters, where these parameters will be substituted > based on attributes attached to targets. > > > It occurred to me that some of those > > capabilities might be useful for other users as well, so I would like to > be > > able to contribute them back to the community if they are something > people > > think would be generally useful. > > Definitely, we would welcome that. > > > What would be the best way to structure my development environment so > that I > > can modify ACE as needed to make it work for us, but still be able to > easily > > commit those changes later? > > Contributions are usually submitted back as patches. These patches are > attached to Jira issues, so we can track their status. > > > I've never contributed to an open-source > > project before, so maybe there is a standard way to isolate our changes > from > > the development trunk that I'm not aware of. > > There are no special things in place for that. Just checkout the project, > make your changes and create a patch from that. > > > Any pointers to documentation > > or tips in this area would be greatly appreciated. > > http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html provides some general > information on how the Apache Software Foundation works. > > How to best create patches depends on your favourite IDE. What are you > using? > > Greetings, Marcel > >
