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Open Source Contribution Process Overview


Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash
I’m Rodrigo, a tech guy that never stops to learn. I’ve more than ten years of experience working as an IT Consultant, Java/Web Developer and DBA Oracle, in short, Full Stack Developer. This blog is a way to contribute to the community that gave me so much knowledge and, mostly, because it is a requirement for my SPO600 class at Seneca College.

Setting up a blog was a long-time desire. Hopefully, I like it and extend it to other topics later on. However, here I’ll follow the agenda provided by my professor.

My first assignment is to research how to contribute to opensource projects. I picked Angular and Spring-Boot to dig in. Both licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, respectively, have a clear code of conduct and contribution instructions, which are very similar to each other. Also, both use GitHub to share its source code, documentation and track issues.

https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.adoc

The first step is to sign out the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). It is a sort of contract to ensure our identity and authority. Following the steps, you will create your digital certificate and share your public key with the community.

Next, you need to open an issue in the tracking system providing all the information necessary to recreate the problem. Don’t forget to include the versions of all software involved. If you have the solution to the issue, you are encouraged to share it as well.

Then your request will be analyzed by the core contributors. They might add some tags, call others to check it or even ask you for more information. This process could take hours or months, depending on the issue and the member’s availability.

Considering that your request was accepted, they will ask you to download the source code from the master repository and proceed with the changes. All the files that you changed or created will list you as an author using your digital certificate created in the first step. Attempt to follow all coding style guides provided. Then you have to send or commit your fix into the GitHub. Usually, this process creates a fork, meaning that the change will be done outside of the master source.

After committing, your patch will be extensively tested by the team and the whole community. This step is critical to ensure that it is not going to break anything in the new release, which might include new features and many bug fixes.

Finally, if everything is clear, your piece of code will be incorporated into one of the releases, becoming part of the mater source code.

Please note that this path does not apply to security issues. They have private channels for that.

Here is my general understanding of the process. If you found some error, please reach me out, and I’ll glad to fix it.

See you,
Rodrigo
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