I have looked over the document on mentoring and I am ready to start the process so I can contribute to two projects, OpenFire and Smack.
My issue is that there has been no code contributions to the OpenFire pubsub component in over a year. I have identified several problems, and have fixes for many of these problems, but I don’t know who I should contact to be a mentor. The same goes for Smack, as I have written extensions for pubsub for it as well. In this case, it is completely new code that can (and does) work by just including a new jar file, but it would work better if it was included due to heavy usage of custom providers.
The document on mentoring is, I believe, somewhat incorrect in the idea of getting someone who has been “active” in a project, due to the wide ranges of features and extensions of XMPP itself. Someone with heavy contributions to MUC may know nothing about other extensions (like pubsub). I know that is the case for myself, as I have spent a great deal of time over the last 2 months with XEP-0060 (pubsub), but am quite ignorant of most other domains.
Anyway, any advice (and volunteers) on mentoring would be appreciated.
The suggestions for finding a mentor were not designed to be rules, exactly. The idea is if you are going to be doing work on Openfire, dont find someone who only deals with Smack. If you are venturing down a path in Openfire that no one has any good experience with anymore, try to find someone appropriate. Thats the idea anyway. Sadly in these beginning phases there just are not that many active contributors, so the mentorship program will have to work with people who are a little outside their field.
That said, your post here is a great way to find a mentor. You explained well what you want to do, and where you are at. Now its just time to find someone to work with you. If any of the other contributing members would like to help out, speak up and lets get this moving! As a last resort, I am willing to be a mentor, but work has been so busy for me, that I would not be very quick to respond to things.
Thanks. I hope some others will step up to the plate as well, especially since my interests lie in Smack and OpenFire.
As for effort required, the current OpenFire updates are actually quite small with regards to code changes and would fix about 8 defects I listed. So from a mentoring perspective, it would not involve a lot of effort.
As a last resort, I am willing to be a mentor, but work has been so busy for me, that I would not be very quick to respond to things.