Contributing Source Code to OpenPetra.org

Tracking of Bugs and Things to do

We are managing the projects, todo lists, feature requests, and bugs all in one place, also called a Tracker.

We use Mantis for tracking of those things. It can be found here: http://tracker.openpetra.org
Everyone can report issues (we will revise that if the spam becomes too much...).

Workflow of bugs and features in Mantis bug tracker

Mantis provides the following status codes to keep track of a bug or a feature: New, feedback, acknowledged, confirmed, assigned, resolved, closed. The possible values for the next status are shown in the diagram below.

Next status

• • New: feedback, acknowledged, confirmed, assigned, resolved, closed
  • Feedback: acknowledged, confirmed, assigned, resolved, closed
  • Acknowledged: feedback, confirmed, assigned, resolved, closed.
  • Confirmed: feedback, assigned, resolved, closed
  • Assigned: feedback, resolved, closed
  • Resolved: feedback(reopened), assigned, closed
  • Closed: feedback(reopened), assigned, resolved(retest)

Questions and Discussions

For questions and discussions there are two places where this should happen:

• Questions and discussions which should be trackable over time and might lateron shed light on how decisions were made in the project:
  • Those discussions should happen in the Forum. It can be found here: Developer Forum
• Questions and discussions which are about short-lived things or problems and where it isn't necessary to have a record of:
  • Those should happen on our IRC Channel. It can be found on irc.freenode.net in room #OpenPetra

Documentation

• Technical details of an implementation in OpenPetra should always be documented in this OpenPetra wiki.
• Do not use documents (of any file format) for documentation of technical details of an implementation in OpenPetra, because
  • the wiki should be the single central source of information about OpenPetra
  • documents in various file formats don't usually have a change history, but the wiki keeps track of the change history
  • documents outside the wiki might become forgotten on the local machine of a developer (or on a network drive) and no-one else will have (easy) access to them

Bazaar Source Code Repository and Patches

• Core developers have write access to the Bazaar code repository of OpenPetra bzr+ssh://bazaar@bzr.openpetra.org:2208/openpetra/
• New developers should ask for a mentor. See Submitting patches and features for more information.
• Occasional developers need to

1. check out the Bazaar repository anonymously from http://bzr.openpetra.org:8008/openpetra/trunk
2. create a local branch for themselves for the change. Add a patch to the bug tracker record at http://tracker.openpetra.org/ or add a link to a bazaar branch e.g. at http://launchpad.net/

Copyright of Contributions

We need to still discuss how we deal with the copyright of contributions. See also the discussion on this blog about copyright assignment.
Please let us know what you would prefer! OM is a charity, and it might be a good copyright holder to make relicensing easier. But if that is a big problem for you, please let us know, and we can discuss it.