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  • When possible, your contribution should be a patch against the SVN Trunk.
  • Ensure the code is commented and correctly formatted (you can use Eclipse's format function to do that or a tool like Jacobe ). Refer to the Coding Conventions section below.
  • Your contribution must adhere to licensing requirements to be included. Refer to the Licensing of Contributions below
  • User interface patches must be internationalised (see the I18nSupport guide)
  • User interface patches must be XHTML-compliant and have a W3C WAI Conformance Level of "Double-A"
  • Technical and User on-line help as part of the patch. Technical documentation must be part of the system docs – see Documentation Contributions below.
  • Examples or Use Cases should be submitted to help Committers understand and adequately test the patch prior to applying it to the core code
  • Patches should be small diffs (no large all encompassing patches!) using the unified output format. If you need help with generating a patch, there are many good resources out on the web. Here are just a few:
  • Any new features should be configurable (i.e. try not to make features specific to your own institution, they need to be generalized if possible). Be careful in particular with the `dspace.cfg` file. Make sure you only patch this if you change involved new configuration parameters in it, and make sure you have good default values for them. Don't accidentally include your own local configuration parameters (e.g. host name etc) in the patch! If the new feature is in any way specific to a particular application (e.g., open access, theses), it should be switched off by default
  • If you add new configuration parameters, name them appropriately. Also, they should not be required to be in dspace.cfg – if the parameters are omitted, DSpace should continue to operate as before.
    • For example, if you add a new e-thesis-related submission step, you might add a couple of new config parameters: webui.submit.thesisstep, and webui.submit.thesisstep.colour. If webui.submit.thesisstep = false, the submission process should not be affected for those not using DSpace for e-theses. Also, if your code finds that webui.submit.thesisstep is missing, it should assume a default of 'false' so that after an update, previous installations of DSpace behave as expected, and they do not have to add that parameter to their dspace.cfg.
  • Add appropriate WARN, INFO and DEBUG-level logging. Use the included Apache Log4J toolkit, in concert with the `org.dspace.core.LogManager` class to do this. See `org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.DSpaceServlet` for an example of how to do this.
  • Retain backwards compatibility where possible
  • No DBMS schema changes unless absolutely necessary – this will mean upgrading would require effort. In this case, you also need to supply upgrade instructions and/or code to upgrade in existing installation. See 'Database schema changes' below
  • Any changes must be Java 1.6 compliant.

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