Contributing to Vex

This page describes how to download, build, and run the Vex source code, and how to submit any bug fixes or new features for inclusion into Vex.

Licensing

Vex is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, or LGPL. In a nutshell, the LGPL grants the following rights.

You may bundle the Vex libraries in other open-source or commercial products.
You may change Vex to suit your needs; however, if you redistribute your changed version of Vex, you must also make the source code to your changed version available.

If you submit a change to Vex to the Vex project, you retain the copyright to your change, but you agree to license it under the LGPL. If your change is incorporated into Vex, you will be given credit as a contributor.

Downloading and Building Vex

Vex is available as an anonymous CVS download from Sourceforge. The Eclipse IDE is required to build Vex. The following steps should help you get going.

Download and install the Eclipse IDE from eclipse.org. Version 3.0M1 or greater is required. You will also need to download the Java 2 SDK version 1.4 from java.sun.com if it is not already installed on your machine.
Check out a copy of the CVS source code from the Sourceforge site. The easiest way to do this is via the Eclipse CVS view as follows.
1. From Eclipse main menu bar, select Window > Show View > Other.... Open the CVS node, select CVS Repositories, and click OK.
2. Right-click the CVS Repositories view and select New > Repository Location....
3. In the Host field, enter cvs.sourceforge.net .
4. In the Repository path field, enter /cvsroot/vex.
5. In the Username field, enter anonymous.
6. Click Finish. After validating the connection, the dialog should close and the repository should be shown in the CVS Respositories view.
7. In the CVS Repositories view, expand the repository and the HEAD node.
8. Right click on vex-all and select Check Out. This will create a number of projects in your workspace. vex-all is an alias for all current Vex CVS modules.
Run Vex from Eclipse as follows.
1. From the Eclipse main menu bar, select Run > Debug....
2. Under Configurations, select Run-time Workbench and press the New button.
3. On the right side of the dialog, enter a name for this configuration in the Name field, for example, Vex. Other defaults in this part of the dialog should be OK.
4. Press the Debug button. Eclipse should launch another instance of the workbench containing the required Vex plugins.
5. Before you can edit XML documents with the Vex editor, you must define document types and styles for the kinds of documents you wish to edit. One easy way to do this is to import the Vex samples, which contain document types and styles for XHTML 1.0 Strict and Simplified Docbook 1.0. To load vex-samples, perform the following steps from the runtime workbench .
  1. Right-click in the navigator view and select Import....
  2. Select Vex Samples and press the Next > button.
  3. Press the Finish button. The Vex samples are imported into your workspace in the project vex-samples.