Contributing

We are trying to make OpenORB the best open-source CORBA ORB around and to achieve this goal we need your help. Either as a user, a technical writer, or a developer we would appreciate to hear from you.

As a user you could help out by answering questions on the mailing-lists, supporting other users to get problems solved, or by making feature requests and submittingbug reports.

Open-source projects often lack high quality documentation. New users depend on good documentation and it definitely helps to reduce the traffic on the user mailing-list. So if you are good at writing documentation you are wlcome to join the team.

As a developer you could fix bugs, help adding new features to OpenORB or any of its services, write JUnit test-cases, improve the build-system, or any other task of which you feel the need to get improved.

The first thing is to get subscribed to the openorb-user mailing list. All usage related questions should go to this mailing-list only. When you have a problem using OpenORB you should follow the steps below:

• Read this documentation carefully.
• Read the FAQ at the end of this document.
• Search the openorb-user mailing list archive for user requests with a similar or the same problem.
• Send a message to the openorb-user mailing list describing your problem there.

You should be subscribed to both mailing lists openorb-users and openorb-devel. The first one gives you a good impression about which questions should be covered by the documentation. The openorb-devel list is for internal development of OpenORB and thus any discussion about writing documentation should go here.

As a developer you should also be subscribed to both mailing lists: openorb-users and openorb-devel. Any proposal for a new feature should be sent to the openorb-devel mailing list and will be discussed there. As a developer you should always know what the user thinks of a certain feature and therefore subscription to the openorb-user mailing list is substantial.