Title: Hooray I'm Eclipse contributor
Date: 2014-08-06
Lang: en

While doing a big refactoring for a customer I stumbled over a missing feature in Eclipse's refactoring dialog: you cannot double-click to expand packages in the dialog that selects the destination when moving classes.

This was a good chance to actually do some hacking in JDT. I was able to add the feature fairly quickly but then I had trouble contributing the fix back to Eclipse. First, I tried [on github](https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.jdt.ui/pull/5) as the Eclipse source was hosted there. But the pull request kept sitting by itself fairly unnoticed for quite some time.

Then my dear friend [Holger](https://twitter.com/@asynchronaut) brought my attention to a [blog post by Lars Vogel](http://blog.vogella.com/2014/03/27/eclipse-platform-contributors-please-convert-any-patch-you-have-to-a-gerrit-review/) which suggests using Eclipse's Gerrit review platform for contributions.

So I repackaged my fix as a [Gerrit commit](https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/24217/). Much to my surprise the contribution got attention by someone at Eclipse. After some time it even made its way back into the main platform. So it seems like I'm an Eclipse contributor now :-)