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Support and Contribution Process
Before asking for help
- Search the User Documentation before asking for help.
- Search the FAQ
- Check your configuration files for any obvious defects.
- Check that you're starting up the processes correctly.
Getting support
OK, you did all that and you still have a problem. Here's what you should do, in this order:
- Ask on irc.freenode.net #opensim and #opensim-dev. Approach them in that order :) Please be courteous and remember that the developers and anyone else assisting you are volunteers there, and have no obligation to help you.
- Don't ask to ask, just ask.
- Phrase your question in the form of a question.
- Be specific.
- Explain the problem.
- Describe how to reproduce the problem.
- If you need to paste configuration files or error messages, please paste to pastebin then send the link in the IRC channel.
- If no-one in IRC is able to help at the moment, you can try one of the mailing lists that are available for communication between users and developers, in this order.
- opensim-users - a user support forum for OpenSim
- opensim-dev - development discussion of OpenSim
- If you come to the conclusion that your problem results from an OpenSim bug, you can file a bug report (see below how). If you pursue this, make sure you have all the data that supports your bug report. Filing a good bug report that the developers will pay attention to requires a substantial effort on your part. If you are not willing to make that effort, don't bother to file a bug report.
If you aren't used to interacting with open source developers, we recommend reading this. At the very least you will be amused!
After you get help
- If the problem is a bug, and no-one is able to help you, please submit a bug report. Read below for how to do this.
- If someone did help you, please document the problem and the solution on the wiki if it's not there yet
Attending office hours
If you would like to contribute to the project, the second thing you may want to do(after learning about the project) is visiting the in-world OpenSim discussion hours.
Reporting Bugs
Please read Bugs
Feature Requests
You may have an idea for moving opensim into an interesting direction that hasn't been explored yet. If you do, the process is as follows:
- Describe your idea either in an email message or, better yet, somewhere on the Web. Then start a discussion about it on the opensim-dev mailing list, to have a feeling for what the developers think about your idea, and to get some advice on how to go about implementing it. If the feeling you get is that the developers are not interested, you can always implement your idea as a GForge project or as your own proprietary extension. If you get the feeling that there is a chance your idea will be accepted as a core contribution, read on.
- Implement your idea on your own copy of opensim, and make it available for users and developers to try it out without much effort. The lower the effort for people to try it out, the higher the chances people will try it and accept it.
- If you're not a programmer, your only possible course of action is to convince some programmer (core or not) to implement it for you. Keep in mind that the opensim developers do not work for you, and are busy implementing the things that interest them. And if an idea is just an idea without code behind it, it will be ignored.
- Once you have an implementation, submit it to the developers via a core patch on mantis. All patches submitted via mantis are evaluated by the core developers, possibly discussed with the submitter for further clarifications and improvements, and applied to the core code if there are no objections.
Submitting Patches
The developers also use Mantis to review patches for inclusion in opensimulator's core SVN.
- There are several guidelines to the patch review process. You will need to agree to our contributor agreement and be willing to take feedback on the patch. Not all patches will make it into OpenSimulator for a variety of potential reasons. OpenSimulator is not trying to be 'everything for everyone' so, often, it's requested that the functionality be implemented in a module that gets it's own project on forge. For more information, please review Submitting_code_to_OpenSim and Contributions_Policy
- Please submit patches with diffs from the root OpenSim directory rather than in the directory of the source file/s you're changing.
- You can submit your patch as an svn diff patch file on any issue on Mantis. You should also move the bug into the Patch Included state to let us know there's a patch waiting to be applied. If you are using TortoiseSVN on Windows, you can right-click in the opensim directory and select "Create patch" to create a diff.
- After you have submitted a patch, please ensure to update the title of the bug with [PATCH] - Fixes /Issue/.
- General turnaround time for patch review is 48 hours. though, it could be up to two weeks depending on the situation. Generally, if nobody comments on your patch within 3-5 days, pop into #opensim on IRC and make sure that you remind them of the PATCH.
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