Contributing to Catalyst

The main philosophy behind Catalyst development can be summarized as:

    Patches welcome!

Everyone is welcome (and will be encouraged) to contribute to Catalyst in whatever capacity they're able to. People in #catalyst-dev will be more than happy to talk newcomers through contributing their first patch, or how best to go about their first CPAN extension module....

Catalyst development

Discussing proposed bugfixes or improvements

<http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/#Community> has information about how to get in touch with the Catalyst ``community''. In particular, you would want to discuss a proposed change on the mailing list:

    http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

or on IRC:

    irc://irc.perl.org/catalyst-dev
    http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/livegroups

Usually, the core team will be more than happy for you to contribute, and will talk you through how to submit a patch, or get a ``commit bit''.

Repositories

The Catalyst git repository can be found at:

    read: git://git.shadowcat.co.uk/catagits/PROJECTNAME
    write: [email protected]:PROJECTNAME
    browser: https://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi

The Catalyst subversion repository can be found at:

    svn: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/Catalyst
    browser: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/svnweb/Catalyst

Schedule

There is no dated release cycle for Catalyst. New releases will be made when sufficient small fixes have accumulated; or an important bugfix, or significant feature addition, is completed.

Roadmap for features

The Catalyst Roadmap is kept at <http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=catagits/Catalyst-Runtime.git;a=blob_plain;f=lib/Catalyst/ROADMAP.pod;hb=master>

Bug list

The TODO list with known bugs / deficiencies is kept at <http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=catagits/Catalyst-Runtime.git;a=blob_plain;f=TODO;hb=master>

The Catalyst Core Team

The intention of the Catalyst Core Team is to maintain and support the Catalyst framework, in order for it to be a viable and stable framework for developing web-based MVC applications. This includes both technical decisions about the Catalyst core distribution, and public relations relating to the Catalyst framework as a whole.

The current goals of the Catalyst core development team are stability, performance, and a properly paced addition of features, with a focus on extensibility.

The core team is concerned with the 'core' Catalyst distributions (i.e. Catalyst::Runtime, Catalyst::Devel and Catalyst::Manual), and also tries to encourage best practices for extension authors, and cooperation and shared vision within the Catalyst community.

Membership

The Catalyst Core Team consists of the developers who have full commit privileges to the entire Catalyst source tree, and who have made a significant contribution to the core Catalyst distributions, and various extensions and plugins.

In addition, the core team includes members that have non-technical roles, such as marketing, legal, or economic responsibilities.

Currently, the Core Team consists of the following people:

Brian Cassidy

Andy Grundman

Christian Hansen

Yuval Kogman

Marcus Ramberg

Jonathan Rockway

Jesse Sheidlower

Matt S. Trout

Florian Ragwitz

Tomas Doran

New members of the Core Team must be accepted by a 2/3 majority by the current members.

Technical Decisions.

Any change to the Catalyst core which can not be conceived as a correction of an error in the current feature set will need to be accepted by at least 3 members of the Core Team before it can be committed to master (which is the basis for CPAN releases). Anyone with access is at any time free to make a branch to develop a proof of concept for a feature to be committed to master.

Organizational and Philosophical Decisions.

Any organizational or philosophical decision should be decided by majority vote. Thus it should be a goal of the organization that its membership number should at any time be an odd number, to render it effective with regards to decision making. The exceptions to this rule are changes to this charter and additions to the membership of the Core Team, which require a 2/3 majority.

CPAN Releases

Planned releases to CPAN should be performed by the release manager, at the time of writing Marcus Ramberg, or the deputy release manager, at the time of writing Florian Ragwitz. In the case of critical error correction, any member of the Core Team can perform a rescue release.

Public statements from the Core Team

The Core Team should strive to appear publicly as a group when answering questions or other correspondence. In cases where this is not possible, the same order as for CPAN releases applies.

New Catalyst Extensions

As Catalyst is deliberately designed for extension, there is an ecosystem of several hundred Catalyst extensions that can be found on CPAN.

See Catalyst::Manual::ExtendingCatalyst for more information on how to extend Catalyst in various ways and how to write CPANable components for Catalyst which can be reused in many applications.

It is recommended to post a request for comments to the Catalyst mailing list, or ask around in the #catalyst IRC channel before starting to implement something, as another member of the community is likely to have example or prototype code that you can reuse, and members of the community and core team are happy to advise on the best way to implement a generic solution to a particular problem.

This could save you duplicate work, and will help you produce a better thought out and designed extension.

AUTHORS

Catalyst Contributors, see Catalyst.pm

COPYRIGHT

This library is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.