Gettingstarted

The goal of this page is to provide a path thru the existing documentation helping new participants to work in the openECTS project. An overview of the available documentation can be found [here] (Documentation)

The organizational structure

openETCS is organized in several projects. Initially there is one top-level project for every work package. These projects are named after the topic of the WP, e.g the WP3a project is named "toolchain". Toplevel projects can have several sub projects, e.g. for tasks of the work package. There is at least one mailing list for every project. All openETCS projects are listed here.

Getting help

• Project Office: Please contact the Project Office for general questions regarding openETCS and to get access to private repositories
• Help Desk: Please the Help Desk for general questions regarding the openETCS infratructure

Communication

The most important step is to get in contact with the right people. Every project maintains a mailing list. You should join on the mailing list of the projects you are interested in. Please see here how to join a mailing list and here for a list of all mailing lists. In any case you should join the mailing list: announcement@openetcs.org

Accessing project resources

Once you know the project you are interested in, you might want to access the resources of this project. Every project maintains a GIT repository and a wiki. In openETCS all project's repositories and wikis are public (read access). However, during the initialization some repositories are only accessible for members of the ITEA consortium. Therefore you need to get read access to the repository. You will need a GitHub Account to access these kind of repositories. After you identified the project you want to get access to, please send a mail to the project office including:

• Your full name
• Your affiliation
• If you are unknown to the project: the responsible person for openETCS within your organization
• Your GitHub Account name
• The name of the project you want to get read access to

Once you are notified, that your are added to the project you can access the wiki and the issue tracker using GitHub. You can also clone the project's repository. You a free to use any kind of Git client. If you want to use SmartGit, the openETCS project can offer a license for you (to be used for the project only). Please contact the help desk to get this license.

Contributing

Once you are participating in a project, you might want to contribute changes to it's project resources. Only committer are allowed to directly push to the repository. If you are not an committer yet, you can do a contribution. This means to submit the changes you want to apply to the project and one of its committers need to apply these changes to the repository. If you want to do a contribution, please follow these guidelines. You should also read the openETCS Development Process.

Becoming a committer

If you continuously contribute to a project, the existing committers might elect you to be a committer, too. Committers have write-access to the projects repository. To become a committer, you will need to sign a committer agreement. Please get familiar with the openETCS Development Process to learn how to become a committer.

Creating a new project

If you are working on a sub-task it might make sense to create a new project as a sub-project of the top-level project you are involved in. Please refer this documentation how to propose a new project.