Hi all, I've committed a new mojo to the commons build plugin, which generates a README.md file for a component [1]. README.md files are used by github to create some kind of a landing page, when you browse a repository. It makes a repository more inviting to people using github, so I consider it an asset for attracting new contributors. In the past I've created these files by hand, but this is becoming crumbersome. That's why I've added the new mojo.
I've created a fork of [csv] to give you an impression of how the generated README.md will look like [2]. You can try the mojo out yourself, by following these steps: - checkout the commons-build-plugin from https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/commons/proper/commons-build-plugin/trunk - mvn install the plugin - checkout the commons parent pom from https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/commons/proper/commons-parent/trunk - change commons-parent to use commons-build-plugin:1.5-SNAPSHOT - mvn install commons-parent - change your component's pom to use commons-parent:35-SNAPSHOT - call mvn commons:readme-md One thing we should consider is to create an additional template for a CONTRIBUTION.md. If a github repo has such a file, it will be displayed to potential contributors. You can learn more about this here [3]. An example for a good CONTRIBUTION.md can be found here [4]. The README.md would be regenerated for each release, since it contains the maven coords. The CONTRIBUTION.mb only needs to be created once or when our contribution guidelines change (which in turn would require a new release of the build pluing with the new template). If nobody has objections, I'll add a mojo for generating a CONTRIBUTION.md and then start the release process for a new version of commons-build-plugin. Regrads, Benedikt [1] http://svn.apache.org/r1619060 [2] https://github.com/britter/commons-csv/tree/readme-md-mojo-test [3] https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines [4] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md -- http://people.apache.org/~britter/ http://www.systemoutprintln.de/ http://twitter.com/BenediktRitter http://github.com/britter
