MoDisco/How to contribute

The MoDisco project is open to contributors. All external contributions are welcome :

• new modernization use-cases
• extensions of MoDisco components
• metamodels of legacy technologies
• discoverers and model transformations

How To contribute

To submit your MoDisco contribution, please open a bugzilla entry in the Modeling/MDT/MoDisco component (you can use the following address: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi?product=MDT.MoDisco&component=Contribution). Then you can attach your project(s)/file(s).

In the comment section of the attachments, you have to:

• list all the authors of the contribution
• to confirm that :

 (a) I, <first name> <family name>, wrote 100% of the code I've provided.
 (b) I have the right to contribute the code to Eclipse.
 (c) I contribute the content under the EPL.
 (d) This contribution contains no Cryptography features.

Each other authors has to send the previous confirmation message as a comment of the bug.

The MoDisco team works hard to maintain a the MoDisco quality. Each contribution, will increase the work of MoDisco team (bug tracking, testing, support to users,...). That’s why we strongly expect within each contribution:

• unit tests validating the behaviour of the provided feature are strongly expected,
• a documentation of the contributed features,
• any information useful to maintain the component.

Before to be integrated the contribution will be reviewed by one ore more committer and validated by Eclipse IP Team.

If you need more details, please use the MoDisco newsgroup.

What to check before contributing

If you wish to publish your component(s) in this project, please check the following points :

• Provide an about.html file (Cf. The_about.html, Guide To Legal Doc)
• Provide your code with the header described below
• Check unused plug-in dependences
• Check that there exists one branding plug-in per feature
• Externalize strings from code

The following Bash command can be used to search missing about.html files:

 $ find org.eclipse.mdt.modisco* -name build.properties \! -exec grep -sq about.html {} \; -type f -print

Authoring and Intellectual Property

In the comments of your code, you have to mention your identity and company by mail, URL, etc. In this way you may get back some advice from interested people.

Header Syntax

 /**
 * *******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) <year> <company>.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 * 
 * Contributors:
 *     <contributor> (<company>) - Bug <bug id> - <Bug description>
 * *******************************************************************************
 *
 * $Id$
 */

Manifest file

In the MANIFEST.MF:

• the vendor name must be "Eclipse Modeling Project"
• the plug-in name must end with "(Incubation)"
• the plug-in version must end with ".qualifier"

In the MANIFEST.MF the strings must be externalized (use "PDE Tools > Externalize Strings...")

String Externalize

Select the project, then use "Source > Externalize Strings...". A wizard shows strings to internationalize.

Take care of not using concatenations in messages, since each language might have a different order. For instance, rather than :

       MoDiscoBrowserPlugin.logError("Condition query " + queryName + " in query set "
               + querySetName + " : expected boolean return type, got "
               + conditionResult.getClass().getSimpleName() + ".");

We will prefer to have:

in messages.properties :

       CustomizationEngine_conditionQueryWrongReturnType=Condition query {0} in query set {1} : expected boolean return type, got {2}.

in source :

       MoDiscoBrowserPlugin.logError(NLS.bind(
               Messages.CustomizationEngine_conditionQueryWrongReturnType,
               new Object[] { queryName, querySetName,
                       conditionResult.getClass().getSimpleName() }));

Moreover, Eclipse recognizes Bundles Messages and displays the string content when the mouse pointer hovers on a key in the source. And by doing "Source > Find Broken Internationalized String", we may find the undefined or unused keys.

You may activate the strings verification in Eclipse preferences : Window > Preferences > Java > Compiler > Errors/Warnings > "Non-externalized strings (missing/unused $NON-NLS$ tag"

Version numbering

See the guidelines for version numbering of MoDisco components.

build.properties

The following files and folders should never be in "src.includes" (see bug 286808):

• .classpath
• .project
• .settings/
• META-INF
• OSGI-INF/
• bin/
• build.properties
• plugin.xml
• plugin.properties
• src

When a file is in bin.includes, it should never be present in src.includes, with the exception of about.html.

Get the source of MoDisco project

SVN Howto