Joining the Team

Thank you for visiting this page in the wiki. This hopefully means you are interested in helping us making SharpDevelop an even better Open Source IDE. Now you want to know how to go about it, great!

SharpDevelop is quite a big piece of code by now, small bugs that can be easily fixed therefore are unavoidable. If you find such a bug and fix it using less than eight lines, you can post the fix in the forum.

If the fix/patch exceeds a size of about eight lines of code, you will need to sign the Joint Copyright Agreement. The reason for this JCA is simple: protection for you and us from legal issues (e.g. patent infringement suits). The copyright is shared between you and our sponsor http://www.alphasierrapapa.com which will provide legal insurance should a legal challenge be raised. However, you are still free to use your contributed code in your own projects as well.

After having signed the JCA, you will get access to the sharpdevelop-contributors mailing list where you can post patches (as subversion patch files). Someone from the team will review your patches and commit them to the Subversion repository if they are OK.

After posting a few good patches, you can get commit access to the subversion repository and directly commit your changes there.