Hi everyone, A few weeks ago someone named Toni asked a question here how could he help with contributing code, asking for directions on what to do. Here's the thread link: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/netbeans-dev/201805.mbox/%3CCACkjAxSPovz5UZWik1mBrbKmCyNi_bsH4PWdT=u1xn8rebu...@mail.gmail.com%3E The response was to go try help someone else develop springboot plugin, but no clear directions.
Here I am in the same situation, trying to reboot my NBP development and wondering once again how to actually contribute. I first headed to: https://netbeans.apache.org/ one of the big links says " Participate <https://netbeans.apache.org/participate/index.html>". Ok. There's a separate page for "Contributing Code <https://netbeans.apache.org/participate/submit-pr.html>", but it doesn't give much useful info, it tells you there's a JIRA instance with a link leading to some strange summary page <https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/NETBEANS/summary> and tells you how to set up git, but it doesn't tell you anything about setting up the project/dev env. So I cloned the github repo once again. I see a gazillion folders which are all NB modules. I don't see a single module suite or nbp app that can be run. How should one proceed? Can you please show an example of a simple "contribution" (which can be anything)? I can open each module separately in the IDE, but AFAIK each module's dependencies at this point actually come from the platform that comes with the IDE itself. At least that's what I see when I right click a module and select properties. That doesn't look right. How do I try out my changes? The download <https://netbeans.apache.org/download/index.html> page tells you how to build IDE from scratch, but that takes forever. The only way I see is to generate an NBM and try installing it into the running IDE, which also doesn't look the right way. I've already asked in this mailing list if there is an example of an app built on top of platform 9.0 and Gj pointed to visualvm <https://github.com/oracle/visualvm>. That one comes with its own platform build <https://github.com/oracle/visualvm/blob/master/visualvm/nb90_visualvm_12022018.zip>. How do we make our own with only the clusters needed? This email starts getting too long, but I guess the premise is clear - what's the entry point for contributions? I'm following this project and the dev mailing list, and still I couldn't find anything in a reasonable amount of time. One suggestion is to choose one specific commit on github right now, use it as a starting point of the codebase. Also select one simple issue from JIRA (better probably to create a fake one to use as an example) and walk through all the steps from getting the code to fixing the issue and publishing the PR. Best, Dmitry
