Thanks for your interest! Hibernate ORM is an open source project and community. There’s many ways to be part of the community and make a contribution—coding Java is a small part of the work involved in maintaining this project.
Helping other users
The community page lists several places for users to find help, such as Zulip and the forum. And users often look for help in other places such as StackOverflow. A great way to get involved in the community is to share your knowledge with others who need it.
Improving documentation
An extension of helping other users is to contribute documentation. It’s the help that keeps on giving! Whether you simply fix a typo, reword an unclear section, or add a whole new section or topic, improving the documentation helps everyone.
Discussing development
As the development team discusses design of new features or tries to prioritize work, it’s great to have input from users. You can find the different places to get involved in development discussions on the Community page.
Reporting and investigate bugs
Trying out releases and reporting and fixing problems is in many ways the cornerstone of open source development. It’s especially critical in the case of early releases (Alphas and Betas) as we are trying to solidify APIs and contracts. A huge problem faced by open source projects like Hibernate is that most users avoid tring out a new release until after it’s already gone final!
When creating a bug report, please have a test case available that can be used to reproduce the issue and act as a long-term regression test. Please see Hibernate Test Case Templates for an easy way to start!
Even if you can’t provide a fix for a bug, submitting a test case for a reported bug that didn’t come with a test is a great start on getting the bug resolved.
Speaking of JIRA, helping us identify issues that duplicate other issues or that are out of date is also a huge help. And voting for issues that are important to you is important in terms of how the development team sets priorities. Believe it or not, we really do pay more attention to issues with more votes!
Contributing code
Details on contributing code and documentation are covered in CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository root directory.
Details on building the project are covered in the README.md, also in the repository root directory.
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Maintaining a community dialect
One area where we really depend on the community is in maintenance of the Community Dialects. The Community Dialects module defines compatibility with a range of older databases, including Informix, Ingres, and Teradata, along with incubating support for SQLLite. These dialects are not maintained by the Hibernate team since we have no way to test them.
There’s plenty of ways these dialects may be polished or extended. In particular, they’re usually missing support for advanced or more recent features of HQL. So if you happen to have access to one of these databases, we’d love it if you could help out!
