Points to consider before posting¶

In a nutshell, if you manage to keep the administrative or otherwise uninteresting work of the people from whom you're requesting help minimal, you stand a better chance of getting what you are looking for. Here are a few tips how to do that:

1. Spend some time trying to figure out the answer to your question before asking for help. Read the available documentation, search this site, the old mailing list and use your favourite search engine to check if your issue has been raised before or your question has been answered already. Experiment with the software or the command line tool and show in your question how far you've come.
2. Consider where to write to. Bug reports, feature requests and patches need a tracking number, please create an issue for any of these. If you're reporting a problem with a specific image, we will most likely need the image, please append it to the bug report if at all possible.
3. In any case, posting here is better than writing to any project member in private as this allows others to discuss the issue and supply answers which a specific individual may not be able to give. Also, others can later find these answers without having to ask again and the whole community benefits.
4. If you'd like to get involved in the development or contribute code, please post your ideas and intentions in the forum before sending a patch, unless it addresses a specific and straightforward open issue. Note that because I dual-license the library, I require the copyright of contributions to the library to be assigned to me.

There is an extensive essay with many more tips and explanations on how to get help for Open Source projects in general, written by real hackers. (Please note that this document is not part of the Exiv2 project, so don't write to its authors for Exiv2 help.)