You don't need to be a software developer to contribute to Apache Rave. To be successful this project requires a huge range of different skills, levels of involvement and degrees of technical expertise. So, if you want to get involved in Apache Rave, there is almost certainly a role for you.

We are looking for people to:

• provide feedback
• write or update documentation
• help new users
• recommend the project to others
• test the code and report bugs
• fix bugs
• give us feedback on required features
• write and update the software
• create artwork
• translate to different languages
• anything you can see that needs doing

All of these contributions help to keep a project active and strengthen the community. The project team and the broader community will therefore welcome and encourage participation, and attempt to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved.

Mailing lists¶

Your first engagement with the project should be to subscribe to our mailing lists.

Decision Making¶

The most important thing about engaging with any Apache project is that everyone is equal. All people with an opinion are entitled to express that opinion and, where appropriate, have it considered by the community.

To some the idea of having to establish consensus in a large and distributed team sounds inefficient and frustrating. Don't despair though, The Apache Way has a set of simple processes to ensure things proceed at a good pace.

In ASF projects we don't like to vote. We reserve that for the few things that need official approval for legal or process reasons (e.g. a release or a new committer). Most of the time we work with the consensus building techniques documented below.

Lazy Consensus¶

Lazy consensus is the first, and possibly the most important, consensus building tool we have. Essentially lazy consensus means that you don't need to get explicit approval to proceed, but you need to be prepared to listen if someone objects.

Consensus Building¶

Sometimes lazy consensus is not appropriate. In such cases it is necessary to make a proposal to the mailing list and discuss options. There are mechanisms for quickly showing your support or otherwise for a proposal and building consensus amongst the community.

Once there is a consensus people can proceed with the work under the lazy consensus model.

Voting¶

Occasionally a "feel" for consensus is not enough. Sometimes we need to have a measurable consensus. For example, when voting in new committers or to approve a release.

Contributing Guidelines¶

We welcome code contributions for both existing and new project issues. If you wish to contribute a solution to an existing entry in Rave's Jira, please first comment on the issue to provide a description and patch for your solution. Submitting the patch to Apache's Jira and selecting the "Grant license to ASF for inclusion" option is required. Then submit your patch to the Apache review system and post a review request to the Apache Rave developer mailing list.

If you wish to submit a solution to a problem that has not been identified in Rave's Jira, first create the new issue following our guidelines and then submit your patch to the review system as before.

In either case, the easiest way to create a patch on the command line is by running the command ''svn diff > Rave-XYZ.patch'' from the top level Apache Rave directory, where XYZ is the Jira issue number.