Advanced Topics - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 484

3. When you are happy with your completed changes, you send a pull request via
GitHub.
When you are adding new source code folders or JAR files to eXist,
it is important to make sure that each of the IDE project files is
updated to support your changes before sending a pull request.
Now, to be clear, all pull requests to eXist are evaluated by at least one member of the
eXist CDT (Core Development Team), each of whom has a responsibility to evaluate
and merge pull requests in a timely fashion. Even the members of the CDT are not
exempt from this process; they too must submit their changes by pull request and
have them merged by a (different) member of the CDT. Nothing is ever merged into
eXist without at least two people knowing about it and agreeing that it improves the
status quo. For full details of the development process employed by eXist, see https://
github.com/eXist-db/eXist#contributing-to-exist .
While simple bug fixes and updates are often obvious and easy to develop, more
complicated bug fixes or features should be openly discussed on the eXist-
development mailing-list . There are two main advantages to doing this:
Avoiding duplication
With each contributor communicating his intentions clearly, we can hopefully
avoid any duplication of work, as it is possible otherwise that two people may be
attempting to solve the same problem simultaneously!
Continuity
This ensures that proposed new features complement the community vision for
eXist. It is very unlikely that a new feature would be rejected outright; however,
there are often many ways to approach the same problem, and an open discus‐
sion between peers can often bring new insights!
Should you have any pressing development concerns, or need to chase a pull request,
at the time of writing, the eXist CDT comprises Tobi Krebs, Wolfgang Meier, Leif-
Jöran Olsson, Adam Retter, Dmitriy Shabanov, Joern Turner, Dannes Wessels, and
Lars Windauer, all of whom should be contactable through the eXist-open and eXist-
development mailing lists. The members of the CDT are not considered special in any
way; they are simply people who have made many contributions to eXist over time
and have a feeling for what eXist means . Anyone is very welcome to join the CDT if
they are willing to invest time to review and merge pull requests in the longer term.
On a more technical level, it is perhaps pertinent to mention here that eXist is written
almost entirely in Java, its XQuery parser is written in ANTLR v2 , and it uses the
Apache Ant build system (although there is an embryonic effort underway to migrate