Hello Everybody! Hopefully, this is more constructive than whiney. I thought I'd share my initial impressions with you about trying to contribute...
I recently got an inkling to add a cool bit of functionality to the EqualsBuilder in the Commons-Lang project. I went through the documentation and stuff, figured out some of the style guidelines and other bits, then went ahead and did a "svn co" of the code I wanted to help with... I started up a project in Eclipse and though there were errors showing up everywhere, I was able to get to the code I wanted to change. I started modifying a bit of the code, and only tried to tackle all the errors popping up when I wanted to compile my code and write some tests against it... That's when I figured out I was having a JDK versioning problem. I was on a Mac (to which I am fairly new), and everything was running the default of JDK 1.5. I looked at some more of the documentation and found that the JAR should be built with JDK 1.2. I figured out how to jump back to JDK 1.4.2 on the Mac, and maybe even to the JDK 1.3.X... But no JDK 1.2. While on JDK 1.4.2, a lot of things seem to resolve themselves, but there are some packages I cannot fix, because they use "enum" which is a reserved word in later JDK's. I haven't yet checked this in JDK 1.3.X, but I figured "Hey, why not go back to the recommended JDK 1.2?" So, I went straight to http://java.sun.com. There in my initial research, I found out that they really aren't keen on even giving out the 1.2 JDK, and there was even a big ol' warning that 1.3.X was soon to be EOL'd (End-of-life'd.). (Nevermind the fact that I am not sure I even COULD get 1.2 installed on my Mac even if I found it...) So, now my question is this: Why must we support JDK 1.2 going forward? I get that we want to be backwards compatible, but how much actual NEW development is going on in archaic JDK's? If I, as a potential contributor, can't even find the JDKs for compiling back that far, shouldn't that be some kind of sign? Is there no consideration made weighing the consequences of upping the JDK requirements VS. the consequences of making contribution so difficult? <taking a breath...> Ok. Sorry if I got a bit rant-y there... I am just kind of amazed the difficulty I am having. I assume we would want to make good contribution as easy as possible. But if I can't just use the published documentation and the source code to figure out what I need to do, I think we are all doing the project(s) and community a disservice. So, did I miss something somewhere? Is there a magic document somewhere that allays all my fears and answers all my questions? Did I need to read all the archived forum responses? Thanks for your time reading my long-winded email! - Nelz --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
