Getting involved

jlt-commons is a shared home for Jolt libraries and tooling. Jolt is a Clojure compiler built on Chez Scheme.

This organization is where the people building on Jolt publish together: libraries that have outgrown a single maintainer, ports of Clojure libraries, and new work that would rather start with company than alone.

jolt-lang keeps the language and its standard library, and everything growing around them lives here. That is the arrangement Jolt's author suggested: the language org stays focused on the essentials, and the wider ecosystem gets one obvious place to be found. The two overlap on purpose, and this organization's admins are members of jolt-lang too.

Core-team work lands here directly. Jolt's author has started eight projects in this organization rather than moving them in later, among them ebb, ensemble and writ. Four more of the author's ports, such as instaparse, moved over from jolt-lang. The projects page lists all of them.

Each project keeps its own maintainers, release cadence and review protocol. What it gains by being here is shared ground: a documentation site built and published for it, CI that checks it against a current Jolt, and conventions worked out once instead of once per repository.

Ways to help

Everyone is welcome here, member or not. Open an issue or a pull request on any repo and someone will look at it.

Fix something. Pull requests are welcome on every project here. For a change larger than a bug fix, open an issue first so nobody duplicates your work.

Bring a project in. Either an existing one that needs a new home, or something new you want to build. Read how to propose a project, then open an issue.

Maintain something. If a project here is looking for a maintainer, say which one in an issue and it is usually yours. When that happens, we are usually far shorter of maintainers than of applicants.

How decisions get made

An admin approving a proposal is enough to bring a project in. That is a low bar and it is honest about how small this organization currently is, rather than describing a committee that does not exist. The governance document says what should change as more people join.

Talking to people

Discussion happens on #jolt on the Clojurians Slack. That channel is shared with the wider Jolt community rather than being a jlt-commons-only room, which is deliberate. A community this size does not benefit from being split up.