xQuidWiki:Community Portal
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How is the community organized?
XQuiD project is formed from a few sub-projects with a group of committers per sub-project, each one formed by a minimum of one member. The xQuiD community consists of his contributors, the sub-project committers and a Board of Directors formed by five elected members.
The Board has authority to:
- Create and remove xQuiD sub-projects
- Vote as a committer in all decisions concerning xQuiD sub-projects
- Change the community rules
- Propose to promote a committer and vote to elect him as a new Board member
A committer of three or more xQuiD sub-projects can be elected by votation as a new member of the Board in case a Board member proposes to extend the Board of Directors.
Committers have authority to:
- Propose new features for a sub-project
- Plan new project releases
- Code review and QA
- Modify the trunk of sub-projects on which he is a committer
- Propose to raise a contributor to the committer level and vote to elect him as a new committer
Committers can make changes proposed by contributors. Contributors can suggest those changes through the tracker and the community forums. After some important suggestions in a sub-project, a contributor can be raised to committer level by votation.
Elections
Elections can be convocated by a Board member or by a committer, depending on the kind of change to be decided. All votes have equal value, regardless of the hierarchy of the voter:
- A positive vote have a value of +1
- A negative vote have a value of -1
- An abstention have a value of 0
The result of a votation will be positive if the average result is over zero. To consider a votation as valid, the total amount of votes have to pass a 50% threshold.
What Can You Do For The Community?
You can be involved in the community helping in a lot of tasks:
- Helping other users on Forums, Wiki and on the Tracker system
- Reviewing and writing documentation
- Working on chips (xQuiD widgets) visual design and features
- Reporting bugs and submitting test cases to help developers solve them quickly
- Writing patches to fix bugs
- Submitting code for new features
Bug Tracking
Most project development revolves around "bugs" or "tickets". All bugs that are found are logged in our tracker and subsequently assigned to developers and milestones in which they'll be fixed. This process helps us ensure that the right things are getting fixed, and the quality of the bug report often determines how quickly the issue will get corrected. The best bug reports include detailed instructions on how to reproduce the bug, an attachment that shows the code for reproducing the issue, or a link to a URL that demonstrates the problem.
All bug reports need to include the following information:
- Browser type (IE, Firefox, Opera, ...)
- Browser version
- OS and OS Version
- All steps necessary to reproduce the issue
- An email address of the person filing the bug or a way to get a hold of him/her
To report a bug, use the following procedure:
- Search for similar issues that might have already been reported
- If you find an existing bug that covers the issue you're experiencing, ensure that it's reported against the right version and has all of the information listed above. Also, adding comments to the ticket noting your support for getting a particular issue resolved helps the committers prioritize, so don't hesitate to shout out if you're encountering something that is already filed
- If no existing bug is found, create a new one that includes all of the information listed above. You can do it anonymously, but we encourage you to create an account
- Add your email in the CC field so that you will receive any updates that are contributed to the ticket. This also provides a way to contact you if there is a need to get more information regarding the bug. This is particularly important for patches where a couple of iterations are sometimes needed to get the patch right before it's accepted.
Forums
The forum is the place to discuss new features and to get or give community support on how to use and extend xQuiD. Complementing the project Wiki, the forums are the easiest place to get started. xQuiD forums have a section for each of xQuiD sub-projects. To submit a post to the forum, you have to be registered in our community.
Subversion Repository
As in all open-source projects, all the project code is freely accessible through a repository. Committers can make changes to the code, either by his own decision or in response to suggestions made by the community contributors. To suggest a change, you can use our forums or submit a "ticket" through the bug tracker system.
How To Become A Contributor
Become a contributor is as easy as be registered in our community and open our tracker system or the project forums to report suggestions, bugs or even some code to solve bugs or to add new features to the project. After some good work, your name can figure in the community contributors list.
How To Become A Committer
After some interesting contributions, any committer of the sub-projects on what a contributor has worked can propose this contributor as a new committer. When this occurs, all Board members and all committers responsible of the related sub-project can vote to elect him as a new committer of this sub-project. You can get more information reading how is the community organized.
Special Notes for xQuiD Eclipse Plug-in
By now, xQuiD Plug-in for Eclipse is not an open-source project, so the xQuiD community can't work on it although everyone can use it freely. The Board is discussing the convenience to release it under an open-source license.
