Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

Hi All,

Please note: no criticism is intended here: just an idea for improvement.

Having just signed/submitted a CA, I feel that this is an area that could be
improved to lower the bar for potential contributors to NetBeans. I'm not
sure if I'm the only one who doesn't own a scanner, but that turned out to
be a significant hurdle for me submitting the CA: I had to print and post
the PDF. I know that CA's are important, particularly for companies/projects
as large as Oracle/NetBeans, so I would never suggest removing them.
However, I wonder if the process could be made easier (potentially for all
concerned) by adopting an online CA submission system, such as Google has
for individual contributors (
http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html). As far as I know,
corporate CLAs for Google still need to be signed and faxed though.

Cheers,
Daniel

On 16 August 2011 08:06, Petr Jiricka <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Aug 11, 2011, at 3:02 PM, <[email protected]> <
> [email protected]> wrote:
> <snip>
>
>
> I am curious - for those plugins that are no longer actively developed,
> who are the gatekeepers?  If I submit a patch for Visual Web, who signs
> off on it and gets it into the trunk and then builds and promotes it to
> the plugin catalog?  If this is documented anywhere, where is it?
>
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> I think if someone submits patches against Visual Web (e.g. a patch that
> would allow it to compile against and install into NB 7.0), we would just
> give the contributor commit rights for the visualweb repository:
> http://hg.netbeans.org/community-visualweb/ and allow him/her to integrate
> the patch. Someone at Oracle may want to do a lightweight review of the
> changes, but if we did not find anyone to review the patch, I would not
> block the contribution because of that.
> We could then also set up a build job that builds Visual Web and give the
> admin rights for this job to the contributor.
>
> BTW, this question does not only apply to plugins that were formerly
> developed by Oracle, there could be a community-developed plugin that is no
> longer maintained by the original author, but someone else might be
> interested in picking it up and continuing the development. This is the
> situation e.g. with the GWT plugin - I heard that Tim Lebedkov stepped down
> as the maintainer, and it would be useful to have a process for handing over
> the maintenance to other people who might be interested in developing it.
>
> Petr
>
>
>
> all the best,
> peter belbin.
>
>
>