Graphical Modeling Framework/Development Guidelines

General Information

The bullets below should cover all the tasks one would need to accomplish to become a "plugged-in" member of the GMF development community.

• Mailing Lists

GMF has two mailing lists, currently. The main developer mailing list [gmf-dev@eclipse.org gmf-dev@eclipse.org] and the release engineering mailing list [gmf-releng@eclipse.org gmf-releng@eclipse.org]. You are welcome to sign up for both, but it is generally sufficient to just be signed up for the developer mailing list. Now, remember that general questions should be posted to the newsgroup and not to the development mailing list! Development topics, architectural discussions, contribution and Committer voting, etc. all take place on the developer mailing list.

To register for the mailing list, you must provide a valid email address and other information here. Note that in order to access the mailing list archive, you need to have a newsgroup user name and password. Information on the newsgroup is below.

• Newsgroup

As mentioned above, the newsgroup is where general questions are asked and you are encouraged to ask and answer questions as you wish. Look here for information on how to get a password, in addition to a complete list of Eclipse newsgroups.

• Bugzilla

You will most definitely need a Bugzilla account. Look here for information on setting up an account, using Bugzilla, etc. If you're interested in contributing right away, perhaps you can find something here to work on.

Workspace

You will generally work with three (or more) workspaces. Each is discussed here, along with some overall workspace configuration and tips.

• Development Instance

In general, you can install whatever you want in your development instance, while most seem to prefer the bare essentials. As long as you have a target instance that is configured properly for GMF development, it doesn't really matter much. You will likely just need to adhere to equal or greater version numbers of both the Eclipse SDK and EMF.

You may elect to configure your development instance to align with the requirements for GMF development and not bother with two... it's up to you. Of course, as we develop against moving targets (Platform, EMF, and GEF milestone releases), using this feature of the PDE is quite useful.

Once your development instance is configured, you'll need to obtain the GMF source code in your workspace. To do this, there are several options, including the CVS Repository Exploring Perspective, a Team Project Set file (one is maintained here), and use the releng tool found here. Each of these is detailed below:

• CVS Repository Exploring Perspective

In the CVS Repositories view, right click and select New > Repository Location... and fill in according to the dialog shown.