Becoming a Developer
A work in progress. Help out if you can.
A Developer in the ADempiere bazaar is a person who contributes code, documentation or other work that is of value to the community. Anyone can become a Developer by making contributions.
Contents
Becoming a Developer
To gain write access to the SourceForge repositories, all a person has to do is ask one of the project admins found on the SourceForge ADempiere Develop page. There is no vote or process to follow. However, its best not to make the request one of the first things you do. Contribute first, then ask. If the admins recognize you from your activity on the forums and in the trackers, you will get a quick positive response.
Being a Developer with write access to the source code does not mean that you can immediately begin committing changes to the development branch. You must respect the Software Development Procedure. You can create your own repository for contributions and develop freely within that directory. In the main code repository, you will need permission before you can create a branch or start development on a new feature.
After you have proven yourself as a developer, you can ask to join the community as a citizen. Eventually, you can be given the status of Committer with access and responsibility for the main code repository.
Accessing the Code Repositories on SourceForge
Once you are setup, it is simple to clone a ADempiere repository, pull changes from that repository and push changes to the repository (if you have permissions).
First, you will need to install and understand Mercurial (or hg for short) if you are not familiar with it. See these links:
- http://mercurial.selenic.com/ to download Mercurial (and TortoiseHg if you are a Windows User)
- For information on Mercurial, see
- Maybe the best tutorial on HG: http://hginit.com/
- Online-Book "Mercurial: The Definitive Guide": http://hgbook.red-bean.com/
Next, learn about the ADempiere repository structure.
- Visit the ADempiere Development page on SourceForge. Both SVN and Mercurial are listed but Mercurial is the active repository and change management system in use since the summer of 2011.
- The links to the main Mercurial repository are given as:
http://adempiere.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/adempiere/adempiere (read-only - can be anonymous)
- and
ssh://<sf_user_name>@adempiere.hg.sourceforge.net/hgroot/adempiere/adempiere (read/write - shown if logged in - write permission appears if you are a project developer)
- Browse the repository structure. The main repository for the code is in ADempiere. Special contributions and test suites can be found in other repositories.
Setup your copy of Mercurial and create local clones (pristine and working) of the repository to which you will be contributing. See the instructions in Mercurial Test Environment.
If you are using TortoiseHg or the Eclispe plug-in, you can push changes to SourceForge with a password. To use Mercurial directly from the command line, you will need to setup a secure connection with ssh and security key exchanges. Read the documents about Mercurial on Sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Mercurial.
The documents describe how to create a shell on the SourceForge server which you can use to create new directories and initialize repositories.
Mercurial Repo Structure Mercurial and SourceForge Tools PLink Tortoise Hg Eclipse
Managing the Repositories
Branches and tags
Committing a Contribution
What to commit, where to commit
