Hi, first of all, thanks for the summary.
I've added some comments inline.... > Tilman Hausherr <thaush...@t-online.de> hat am 23. April 2014 um 16:49 > geschrieben: > > > Although I'm only mentoring Shaola, maybe some of it is useful for > Dimuthu as well: > > From the mentors list: > === > We now are in the community bonding period [1] which lasts until May 19. > During this period students should learn about your project, your > release processes, the Apache Way, how we do things around here, > interact with the community and close any knowledge gaps they might > have. [1] > http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-what-is-this-community-bonding-all.html > === > Here's a FAQ about Apache: > https://www.apache.org/foundation/faq.html > IMHO most important are "What is Apache about?" and "What is Apache not > about?". (My personal addendum to that is "Apache is not like > Wikipedia". If you've ever edited in wikipedia, you'll notice the > difference after a few days) > > https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html > The roles are simpler than in that text, all committers here are PMC > members, and the PMC chair (Andreas) is also ASF member. That's correct. The fact that I'm a member doesn't have any influence on the project and just for the record Jeremias and Jukka (going emeritus a coule of days ago) are also members. > Only committers and above have write access to the official PDFBOX > repository. So the best would be to set up a copy on an open source > repository. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_software_hosting_facilities > > We're trying to be transparent. So stuff that deals with the > implementation of the project should probably be in the ticket. To see > what I mean, have a look at > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-615 and the related issues. > PDFBOX-615 started with "I will be trying to add this functionality this > week" but it became a huge effort by several people that ended 4 years > later :-) See also John's remarks about my code. It annoyed me somewhat > at the beginning, but at the end it resulted in much better code. +1, it's important that technical discussions are about technical matters and not about personal matters. So try not to get personal and even maybe even harder try not to take any comment personal. :-) > Note that you can edit in JIRA. See an example here > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-2039 > i.e. you can modify previous posts. But, please especially if you're editing older comments, preserve the context. Don't remove parts others have commented on. > Stuff that deals with PDFBOX in general is best in this (publicly > readable) mailing list. The advantage is that others might answer you > (if they want) when I'm working, sleeping, or not on the internet for > whatever reason. Stuff that deals with java, svn and maven - e-mail me > if you don't get the answer within a few minutes from google or from > stackoverflow, i.e. don't waste time searching. > > Using other libraries: this is OK as long as they have an Apache license > or a compatible license (GPL is not). However we don't use many > libraries, everything is already big, so if you want, ask first. (Sorry > if you already mentioned a library, will reread your proposal again > later) Of course it is always OK to temporary use whatever you want to > just test a theory / strategy / algorithm. > Using other code: the code should rather be your own, but you can use > small excerpts from stackoverflow.com etc but indicate it in your code > with a link. Always comment in the code if you were "inspired" by other > peoples code or algorithms or research papers, just look at the existing > shading code for how I did it. > > Don't forget the Apache header in new modules. Otherwise the CI-build will fail. > Your code should work on JDK5, so that we can use it in the 1.8 version > too. So don't use diamond operators, lambda expressions or even > String.isEmpty(). > > IDE: I recommend netbeans but you're free to use your own. Just make > sure that svn (and whatever the hoster will use) and maven are > integrated in it, this will make your life easier. > > A personal recommendation from my student days in the 80ies: don't work > all night. Such code was usually found to be poor/worthless after I had > the much needed sleep. > > Andreas: correct me if I forgot something. Maybe some minor but helpful things... There are some code formatting "rules". We provide a checkstyle config and an ecplise-only code formatter ruleset. I've to check the latter if it's still up to date. Both could/should be used to check the code. All changes should be provided as patch against the trunk in a common diff format so that it can be easily integrated by any of the committers. > Tilman Maybe we should add those information to our website as well. At the moment the ASF CMS doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure that infra is already working on that issue. BR Andreas Lehmkühler
