Contributing to Jaws

There are many ways to contribute to the Jaws project, depending on your interests and your skills:

  • Reporting bugs
  • Submitting new ideas
  • Documentation and translation
  • Helping with development

This guide will cover the four aspects.

Reporting bugs

If you get some error while using Jaws you can report it on the Jaws tickets tracker. By doing this, you’re helping developers to fix the problems and make it better each day.

Quick bug reporting how-to

You found an error on Jaws ? Are you sure ? Okay, nobody is perfect. Before reporting it you must check if somebody else has reported the same bug before. To view all current bugs you need to use our tickets searching tool.

If some bug summary seems similar, click on its “ID” to see all related info: who reported it, who’s working on it and the bug description. If you can provide anymore information about the bug, do so, as it will help us solve it.

If there are no similar bugs reported, you can report it by creating a new bug ticket and submitting the most complete description possible. Your bug description should include informations about your environment (web server, database, PHP version, operating system) and what are the expected result and the actual result.

After your bug reporting, a Jaws developer will be assigned to the bug and it will be quickly resolved.

Submitting new ideas

If you want to share your ideas about the development of Jaws, you have many options:

Documentation and translation

Jaws is in great needs of people willing to write documentation and translations. If you wish to contribute, please contact the Jaws documentation team at jaws-dev@forge.novell.com.

Helping with development

Jaws needs fresh blood ! If you know object-oriented PHP and wish to help in the development of one of the most dynamic open source PHP projects, here is what you need to know !

Source code repository

Jaws developers submit their code to a SVN server. You can get the current development code with anonymous access using this command: 

svn co svn://dev.jaws-project.com/jaws/trunk/jaws <directory>

Patches

Sending patches is the first step to becoming a Jaws developer. If you want to add a new feature to Jaws or fix a bug, you should first email jaws-dev@forge.novell.com, to make sure that nobody else is already working on the feature.

Once you’re done you can email us again and lets us know where we can find the patch. If the patch fixes a bug, please also attach it to the bug it fixes so that it doesn’t get lost.

Becoming a developer

After sending several patches, you can ask for a SVN account on the mailing list. Your request will be evaluated according only to your technical abilities and merit. Once your request is accepted, you will need to provide use with a public SSH key. You can create it using the following command: 

ssh-keygen -t rsa

This will generate your public/private key pair. The public key you need to provide is called id_rsa.pub. To get access to the Trac wiki, you need to generate a MD5 password in htpasswd format. This can be done with the following command: 

htpasswd -n -m foobar

You also need to configure your $HOME/.ssh/config file. Here is an example of what it should contain: 

Host            dev.jaws-project.com
User            foobar
CheckHostIP     no
Port            1008

After you're all set up, you'll be able to make your first write access checkout, using the following command: 

svn co svn+ssh://dev.jaws-project.com/svn/jaws/branches/jaws2

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