2009
07.29
07.29
In part 1 we got the Flex SDK up and running, now it’s time to find a bug to work on.
- If you don’t have an account in the Flex Bug and Issue Tracker, go ahead and sign up. Even if you don’t want to contribute code, you can contribute with bug reports, comments, and by voting on issues. They us JIRA as their tracking software.
- Due to legal issues, Adobe can’t just let anyone submit code to the Flex Framework. Much like other open source projects that are high visibility (apache, mySQL, and others) you have to sign a document giving Adobe non-exclusive rights to your work. In other words, they want to be able to include your code in the SDK without you turning around and suing them for including your code in the SDK. The Contributor License is the actual document you need to print out (pages 2 & 3 only will work), sign, and e-mail back in.
- optional – Once you’re approved, you may want a place to drop some code to coordinate with other developers on the Flex SDK. You can request a Sandbox Account and gain write access to the sandbox area of the Flex subversion server.
- While we wait for the contributor approval, it’s a good time to check out the Coding Guidelines that you’ll be held to. Alongside that is the Coding Conventions that are used in the Flex SDK. Depending on the bug, you may run into this or you may just have to swap a few lines of code around into the proper order. I don’t know if you’ll get outright rejected if you code isn’t perfect (I doubt it) but no one likes refactoring other people’s code.
- Go ahead and keep the Flex SDK Organization handy as well but don’t worry about memorizing it. I’ve used eclipse’s search in files more than anything to hunt a bug down.
In part 3 we’ll deal with finding and quashing a Flex bug. If you want to browse the Flex Bugs, I suggest looking in the SDK Community Bug Fix Candidates list. That’s where I’ll be digging for the next post.
So not only do we have to fix bugs instead of guys being payed for it but Adobe also has to give his permission? Wow opensource….