ContributionGuidelines

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See also the Guide to Developing with DSpace.

Contents

[edit] Contribution Checklist

When you contribute to DSpace, please be sure that your submission adheres to the points in this checklist. The DSpace committers need you to do this to keep quality of the DSpace code high and their work manageable.

  • Your contribution needs to be a patch against the current CVS 'HEAD' branch.
  • Ensure the code is commented and correctly formatted (you can use Eclipse's format function to do that or a tool like Jacobe). Refer to the Coding Conventions below
  • Your contribution must adhere to licensing requirements to be included. Refer to the Licensing of Contributions below
  • User interface patches must be internationalised (see the I18nSupport guide)
  • User interface patches must be XHTML-compliant and have a W3C WAI Conformance Level of "Double-A"
  • Technical and User on-line help as part of the patch. Technical documentation must be part of the system docs -- see Documentation Contributions below.
  • Examples or Use Cases should be submitted to help committers understand and adequately test the patch prior to applying it to the core code
  • Patches must be small diffs (no large all encompassing patches!) using the unified output format (see Submitting a Patch below for flags)
  • Any new features must be configurable. Be careful in particular with the `dspace.cfg` file. Make sure you only patch this if you change involved new configuration parameters in it, and make sure you have good default values for them. Don't accidentally include your own local configuration parameters (e.g. host name etc) in the patch! If the new feature is in any way specific to a particular application (e.g., open access, theses), it should be switched off by default
  • If you add new configuration parameters, name them appropriately. Also, they should not be required to be in dspace.cfg -- if the parameters are omitted, DSpace should continue to operate as before.

For example, if you add a new e-thesis-related submission step, you might add a couple of new config parameters: webui.submit.thesisstep, and webui.submit.thesisstep.colour. If webui.submit.thesisstep = false, the submission process should not be affected for those not using DSpace for e-theses. Also, if your code finds that webui.submit.thesisstep is missing, it should assume a default of 'false' so that after an update, previous installations of DSpace behave as expected, and they do not have to add that parameter to their dspace.cfg.

  • Add appropriate WARN, INFO and DEBUG-level logging. Use the included Apache Log4J toolkit, in concert with the `org.dspace.core.LogManager` class to do this. See `org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.DSpaceServlet` for an example of how to do this.
  • Retain backwards compatibility where possible
  • No DBMS schema changes unless absolutely necessary -- this will mean upgrading would require effort. In this case, you also need to supply upgrade instructions and/or code to upgrade in existing installation. See 'Database schema changes' below
  • NOTE: Omission of one or more of these items is likely to result in the patch not being applied and returned to you for further work

[edit] Coding Conventions

Your code needs to follow the Sun Java code conventions with the following minor modifications:

  • Curly braces must be on new lines.
  • Source files must have a copy of the copyright HP and MIT notice and BSD license at the top (see below).
  • You must use 4-space tabulation.
  • 'else' should be on a new line. 'else if' stays on one line.
  • Users of the Eclipse IDE can have eclipse do the formatting automatically using this profile: - dspace-eclipse-format.xml. See the Eclipse section below for details of how to apply this profile.

Your code should be well commented with Javadoc (including package and class overviews). You should also be prepared to document your code in the system docs, but you don't need to do that before contributing the code.

[edit] Licensing of Contributions

Any third-party libraries (JARs) required to compile or run DSpace must be included. The license of any required jar MUST be compatible with BSD; it must not prevent any commercial use of DSpace, nor have any impact on the rest of the code by its inclusion. It is not acceptible to require additional downloads of JARs to make DSpace compile or function.

Examples of acceptable licenses:

Examples of unacceptable licenses:

JDBC drivers for databases are an exception since:

  • They must correspond to the database version and not the DSpace version.
  • They are not required for DSpace to compile and run; a variety of databases, including open source databases, may be used.

If you are including new jars or later versions of existing jars, you need to include the associated license file for inclusion in the lib/license directory. The README file in the lib directory must also be updated as part of the patch to describe the jar and identify the jar version.

[edit] Database schema changes

Database schema changes will be done only on major revisions to the source; this is when the version number takes the form x.y (e.g. 1.3). When making patches which cause schema changes it is necessary to update all of the relevant SQL files with your sequences, tables, views etc. (in /dspace/etc):

  • database_schema.sql - the SQL to create the database from scratch
  • clean-database.sql - the SQL to remove all the parts of the database
  • database_schema_<old version>-<new version>.sql (e.g. database_schema_11_12.sql) - the SQL to update the <old version> of the schema to the <new version>
  • update-sequences.sql - the SQL to ensure that sequences are set correctly

[edit] Documentation Contributions

Follow exactly the same procedure as above; the documentation resides in the {{{docs}}} directory.

All documentation must be HTML 4.0 strict and use the `docs/style.css` stylesheet. Make sure your patch includes an entry in the index if appropriate -- follow the existing structure/convention.

Please make sure the patch 'diff' are as small as possible; often, if you use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, the patch will end up changing the entire file. This makes it very difficult to tell if changes are being overwritten etc.

One approach is to write the section for your mod in your WYSIWYG editor, save it, run HTMLTidy over the output, and copy over the raw HTML into the checked out docs manually.

Raw HTML editing isn't that scary.

[edit] Submitting the Patch

Submit the patch to the SourceForge DSpace project patch tracking system. Be sure to describe the modification, including the numbers of any bug/feature request items that the patch relates to.


[edit] What Happens Next

Once you have produced and submitted your patch to the DSpace SourceForge project space it must be reviewed, tested and approved by one of the committers (see DspaceContributors for more details). Comments regarding the submission can be posted to SourceForge and you will receive email notification of any feedback. If and when your patch becomes stable and approved it will be integrated into the DSpace code base by one of the committers.

During the normal release cycle a feature freeze will be declared for a given date, and normally only patches submitted prior to that date will be considered for the upcoming release. Any patches submitted after this will be in time for the feature freeze of the following release. The date of submitted patches may be flexible depending on the time available for testing and integration and the urgency/usefulness of the patch. Patches which fix bugs will also generally be considered until much closer to the final release date.

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