How to contribute to Eclipse Xsemantics

First of all, thanks for considering to contribute to Eclipse Xsemantics. We greatly appreciate your help!

Legal Requirements

Xsemantics is an Eclipse project and as such is governed by the Eclipse Development process. This process helps us in creating open source software within a safe legal framework.

First Steps

For you as a contributor, the following preliminary steps are required in order for us to be able to accept your contribution:

Sign the Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement. In order to do so:
- Obtain an Eclipse Foundation user ID. Anyone who currently uses Eclipse Bugzilla or Gerrit systems already has one of those. If you don't already have an account simply register on the Eclipse web site.
- Once you have your account, log in to the projects portal, select My Account and then the Contributor License Agreement tab.
Add your GitHub username to your Eclipse Foundation account. Log in to Eclipse and go to Edit my account.

File Headers

We use a common header across all source files. For a new contribution, please add the below header:

/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) <year> <legal entity>.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * Contributors:
 *   <legal entity> - <short description of contribution>
 *******************************************************************************/

Please ensure <year> is replaced with the current year or range (e.g. 2021 or 2018-2021). Please ensure <legal entity> is replaced with the relevant information.

If you are editing an existing contribution, feel free to add your legal entity to the contributors section.

Signing Off Your Commits

It is a legal requirement that every commit of an author who is not a member of the project must be "signed off" using the same email address used for the user's Eclipse account.

You do this by adding the -s flag when you make the commit(s), e.g.

$> git commit -s -m "Shave the yak some more"

You can find all the details in the Contributing via Git document on the Eclipse web site.