Help us

Remember that IzPack is not a corporate-backed project, thus our development resources are limited.

The great news is that you can help in many ways, even if you are not a developer!

The following is a list of things where you could help out.

Appetizers

• Browse through the list of open JIRA issues:
  • provide a fix, or
  • mention that the issue is outdated / incomplete / duplicated.
• Improve the current Maven build:
  • check and simplify the dependencies
  • check that the plugins are at current versions
  • make sure the build works on Maven 2.2 and 3
  • fix potential Maven bad practices.

Dinner

• Help us make a clean documentation. The old one is still there for a reference, but what we need is something more straightforward for new users.
• Provide a Gradle plugin.
• Provide a BuildR plugin. Done: buildrizpack is a gem which can be downloaded from RubyGems.org.
• Check out the native JNI libraries source code:
  • provide cleanups
  • build up-to-date 32 and 64 bit versions
  • provide a better build infrastructure for those native libraries?
• Make web installers work again.

Liquors

• Continue the code base refactoring and test suite harnessing effort.
• Re-work the console and automated execution modes:
  • they have probably be broken by the changes in 5.0
  • their implementation is everything but clean, it's a hack, so we deserve a cleaner code base here.
• Generators from IzPack XML descriptors to native package management systems and installers:
  • Windows MSI
  • NSIS
  • Debian/Ubuntu
  • RPM
  • Mac OS X Package Installer
  • (...)
• Update management system integration.
• Support for metrics gathering system.

One last thing: do not hesitate to clone a developer repository on GitHub, and share your code with pull requests for review! See our Git Guide for more details on our Git workflows.