Call for volunteers

We are looking for volunteers in the following areas.

1. top priority logback in 10 minutes

   We are looking for a volunteer, preferably a native English speaker, to write a short document describing logback for beginners, entitled say "logback in 10 minutes". This document is likely to be the most widely read document of the project. Writing such a document is an excellent opportunity to learn logback. Obviously, there would be plenty of editorial help and guidance coming from the logback developers.

2. high priority Proofreading the documentation

   We are always looking for volunteers to proofread the documentation. Suggestions as to the design and look-and-feel of the site are also welcome.

3. medium priority Decoder: parse log files and transform them into logging events

   This effort has been started under the logback-decoder project but has stalled. This problem is technically interesting, has a well-defined scope and mostly independent of the logback framework.

4. medium priority Maintain the groovy configurator

   The Groovy configurator, aka Gaffer, although pretty cool, is not getting the attention it deserves. The amount of code involved, although not completely trivial, is far from insurmountable. We are looking for a volunteer to take over Gaffer.

5. Improve OSGi support

   We are looking for an OSGi expert to review our current practices and improve OSGi support in logback.

6. Fixing bugs

   We are looking for volunteers for fixing logback bugs. Volunteering to solve bugs is a good way to learn about any project.

   For those looking for highly technical challenges with limited scope, have a look at various build failures observable on our Jenkins instance.

   Our build is quite stable but failures occur from time to time on our Jenkins instance hosted on a relatively old computer.

   • build #149 with test failure in JoranConfiguratorTest.levelChangePropagator1 probable cause: parallel execution, j.u.l. shared-state overridden by levelChangePropagator0 while levelChangePropagator1 is running
   • build #298 with test failure in AsyncAppenderBaseTest probable cause: race condition
   • build #91 with test failure in SMTPAppender_GreenTest probable cause: race condition, GreenMail server not running at time of message transmission

   These build failures are quite hard to reproduce. If you intend to work on these problems, you will probably first need to make changes to logback code so that the problem becomes easily reproducible. Once the problem is identified and reproducible, solving it should be much easier.

   Setting up the project

   If you wish to contribute to the project or just hack for fun, you will probably want to import logback as a project into your favorite IDE. See the instructions for building logback in Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA for details.