Guide to helping with Maven
As with any open source project, there are several ways you can help:
- Join the mailing list and answer other user's questions
- Report bugs, feature requests and other issues in the issue tracking application.
- Build Maven for yourself, in order to fix bugs.
- Submit patches to reported issues (both those you find, or that others have filed)
- test releases help test releases that are being voted on (see the dev@maven.apache.org mailing list for release votes
- test snapshot plugins help test the latest development versions of plugins and report issues
- Help with the documentation by pointing out areas that are lacking or unclear, and if you are so inclined, submitting patches to correct it. You can quickly contribute rough thoughts to the wiki, or you can volunteer to help collate and organise information that is already there.
Your participation in the community is much appreciated!
Why Would I Want to Help?
There are several reasons these are good things.
- By answering other people's questions, you can learn more for yourself
- By submitting your own fixes, they get incorporated faster
- By reporting issues, you ensure that bugs don't get missed, or forgotten
- You are giving back to a community that has given you software for free
How do I Join the Project?
Projects at Apache operate under a meritocracy, meaning those that the developers notice participating to a high extent will be invited to join the project as a committer.
This is as much based on personality and ability to work with other developers and the community as it is with proven technical ability. Being unhelpful to other users, or obviously looking to become a committer for bragging rights and nothing else is frowned upon, as is asking to be made a committer without having contributed sufficiently to be invited.
Developers Conventions
There are a number of conventions used in the project, which contributors and developers alike should follow for consistency's sake.