Communication#

About the contributors

The group of contributors is full of experts, software engineers and coredevelopers but also full of users, learners and enthusiasts that love doingwhat we do and we want to spread this enthusiasm to you also.

We all have silly questions and we all need help lots of times.We encourage you to be open to communication and we will help as much aswe can.

Due to the scale of the project which includes many languages, everybodycontributing will be faced with new things needed to be learned. Even the mostseasoned C++ developer will need to ask basic questions about R for example.

When communicating, it’s important you mark your communication with appropriatetags ([C++], [R], [Ruby] etc.) so it gets noticed by the right people.

Where to get help 👋#

For any question you may have or problems you are facing you can write touser or developmentMailing Lists,GitHub Discussions or you cancreate an issue onGitHub. Also use GitHub to search through the issues,report bugs and create feature requests or proposals.

GitHub#

Different options of communicating are provided through GitHub where the projectis hosted. What we use areGitHub Issues,Discussions andPull Requests.

You can use GitHub issues to:

  • ask questions,

  • report a bug,

  • propose a new feature,

  • propose a bigger change in the documentation,

  • reporta problem with building one of the Arrow libraries and discussthe possible solution (or write on GitHub Discussions or to the user mailinglist).

    Making an issue about things you are not sure about may feel intimidating,but it is also useful for others and the project.

    Note

    Make sure to add which operating system and Arrow version you are usingin the issue description plus the debug information/error.

If you havea new contribution already written, you can create a PullRequest after creating a GitHub issue and mentioning the way you plan toimplement it. It is important to have one of the Arrow developers agree withyour basic proposal for fixing it. Better to ask before you spend too much ofyour time on something that we might think is not a good idea.

If you want tosolve an issue that is already in GitHub, you shouldconnect with other contributors in the issue comments.

Mailing Lists#

You can subscribe to theuser ordevelopment mailing list and browse forprevious topics or ask questions. Whereas discussion on GitHub only notifies peoplewho are mentioned or are collaborating on a Pull Request, the mailing list allowsyou to broadcast to all users or developers. Use these when you want to get feedbackor answers from a wider audience.

Note

GitHub Discussions has all postsmirrored to the <user@arrow.apache.org> mailing list.Users are welcome to askusage questions in either location.

There is also abiweekly developers sync call that anyone is welcome to join.It is announced on the development mailing list together with the link to join.

See also

More information and links for subscribing to the mailing listscan be found here.

Recommended learning resources#

To find articles on concepts important to Arrow as well as recommended books forlearning languages visitAdditional information and resources.