title: Guidelines for Large Contributions
These are some guidelines for making a large contribution to Apache VCL for people who are not currently committers.
- State on the vcl-dev list what modification you‘d like to make. Some background on why the existing codebase doesn’t work in your situation would be useful. Remember, when you modify existing code, it affects work being done by other contributors, which can result in imposing additional work on them.
- Propose a plan on the vcl-dev list for making the modification. There may be others that want the same modification or something similar that can be incorporated at the same time. Those people can help develop the modification. On the other hand, the modification may have a very negative affect on some other part of the project. Also, this provides an opportunity for existing contributors (those who know the codebase well) to provide input on your plan. The plan needs to include how the modification will be maintained in the future - will you continue to maintain it; will existing contributors have to pick it up and maintain it?
- Create a JIRA issue to track implementation of the plan and start developing. This provides a way for others to track work being done on the modification and ensures information about the modification will be added to the CHANGELOG when the next release is cut.