Hi Mike! I guess I should grab a copy of the source, get it building locally, and then take a look through the JIRAs to find some small tasks that I can figure out how to do with ~zero knowledge of the codebase. That’ll probably be a good shortlist for newbies?
Cheers, — Russ > On 23 May 2018, at 17:51, Mike Beckerle <mbecke...@tresys.com> wrote: > > Hi Russ, > > > Glad you contacted us. Would be great to have another contributor. > > > Your insights are correct - DFDL evolved driven by standardization of > existing data integration tool capabilities, which were focused on files that > you would probably call "data set files", as opposed to image, document, > archive, etc. file formats. We didn't have examples of data integration > systems/tools that did things like file-offsets, so things like the index > structure in zip you described, were beyond the state of the art for > declarative description. > > > But now we have Daffodil open-source, which is the perfect vehicle for > prototyping and creating features enabling these sorts of data descriptions, > and subsequently then, based on that experience, we can feed ideas back to > the DFDL standard for incorporation into a future version of the standard. > > > As for specifics of how you can start to contribute, longer discussion. > > > We have ambition to label the JIRA tickets for Daffodil to identify good > first projects for new contributors, .... The whole pool of JIRA tickets, > which are our project-wide TODO list, is at > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/DAFFODIL > > > There are 450+ tickets open, so there is lots to work on. > > > I'll leave it at that for this message. > > > ...mike beckerle > > > > > > > ________________________________ > From: Russ Williams <r...@reciprocity.com> > Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 5:54:14 AM > To: dev@daffodil.apache.org > Subject: Can I help? > > Hi! > > I stumbled across DFDL / Apache Daffodil yesterday while looking for a way to > specify file formats in a machine-readable form. I was surprised that there > hasn’t been a lot more effort in this space, given the importance for > archival, and I’m very keen to see the project succeed. I’ve not done much > Open Source work before, but I’m a commercial software engineer/architect > with over two decades’ experience, so hopefully I could be of some use. > > I’m particularly interested in the handling of large binary files, which I > see from the wiki and JIRA (e.g. DAFFODIL-1735) is a key area of concern for > you guys as well, but I’m a little concerned that the DFDL 1.0 spec seems to > have been written with some XML-like assumptions of how parsing should work, > rather than how various binary formats are actually parsed (e.g. ZIP, with a > signature at the start, then an index at the end, doesn’t seem to fit the > document model). > > Are you looking for people to get involved with Daffodil? Is there anything I > can help with to get started? > > Warm regards, > — > Russ
