Play in the Sandbox

The Sandbox* is a centralized area for you to share your ideas with the Flex development team and the community. We've created a Sandbox folder in the svn repository where you can publish, play, and collaborate with others on a branch of the SDK. If you have patches or a feature idea, share your idea in the forums and your code in the Sandbox.

As we move forward we'll work to take popular ideas that fit the agreed upon goals of the SDK and incorporate them into the mainline branch (trunk). Here are some guidelines we follow when developing features.

_{* no shovel required}

Get a Sandbox Committers Account

Checking into the Open Source SVN system requires an account. Your account username will be the same email address that you use for the Flex bug database.

1. Sign up on the Flex bug database (instructions).
2. Complete the Contributor Agreement. Make sure the email address you use in the agreement is the same as your bug base email address.
3. Create a password that you'll use with SVN by generating an encrypted value here.
4. Submit your signed agreement and the encrypted password to open-contrib@adobe.com. Once we have approved your agreement you will also have read and write svn access to the Sandbox branch - use the email address you specified in the Contributor Agreement and the password you had encrypted (remember your client takes the unencrypted value silly!).

Getting Setup (using command line svn)

The Open Source site us currently using Subversion 1.4. You should make sure you are familiar with standard SVN usage.

1. Install the subversion command line client
2. Create a sandbox directory in the flex/sdk/sandbox repository:
   $svn mkdir http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/sandbox/[ your sandbox name ] -m "created sandbox directory [ your sandbox name ]"
   (Subversion 1.4 mkdir documentation)
3. Copy the flex/sdk/trunk to your sandbox:
   $svn copy http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/sandbox/[ your sandbox name ] -m "copy the trunk to my sandbox dir"
   (Subversion 1.4 copy documentation)
4. Commit changes to your sandbox at your leisure
   $svn commit [ path to local copy ]
5. Get up-to-date sdk/trunk changes:
   Reminder: The Subversion server is still on version 1.4 therefore merge tracking is not yet implemented. Make sure you are familiar with merging best practices
   • Run the merge command:
     $svn merge http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/sandbox/[ your sandbox name ]
     This command does not commit changes to your repository
     (This merge command will default to the HEAD revision of the trunk. Revisions can be specified, see the Subversion 1.4 merge documentation for more information.)
   • View the status of your working copy:
     $svn status [ path to your local copy ]
     (Subversion 1.4 status documentation)
   • Resolve any conflicts:
     -svn diff
     (Subersion 1.4 diff documentation)
   • Commit the changes to your sandbox:
     $svn commit [ path to local copy ]
     (Subversion 1.4 commit documentation)