Getting in Contact

There is no single "support address" for Apache PLC4X - where to ask depends on what you want to do. Everything below is public and archived, with the one exception noted under private@.

Mailing Lists

The mailing lists are the official channels of the project. Anything that has to be on the record - decisions, releases, votes - happens on dev@, because that is the only place the whole community can follow along and the archives are permanent.

To subscribe to a list, send an empty mail to <list>-subscribe@plc4x.apache.org and reply to the confirmation you get back; to leave one again, use <list>-unsubscribe@plc4x.apache.org. You do not have to be subscribed to read a list - all of them are archived at lists.apache.org.

Posting without being subscribed works, but please subscribe first if you intend to take part in a discussion at all.

Every mail from a non-subscriber has to be approved by a moderator by hand - not just the first one. That is work for a small number of volunteers, every single time, so treat it as the exceptional path rather than the normal way to write to a list.
You will not receive any replies. Answers go to the list, and the list only delivers to its subscribers, so you would have to go and look your own thread up on lists.apache.org to find out whether anybody answered.

List	What it is for
dev@plc4x.apache.org	The development list. All official discussions happen here: design questions, release votes, proposals and anything else that needs a decision. If you are unsure where something belongs, it belongs here.
issues@plc4x.apache.org	Where the traffic from GitHub Issues goes. Subscribe if you want to follow what is being reported without watching the repository on GitHub.
commits@plc4x.apache.org	Where commits and pull-request related posts go. This is a firehose - useful if you want to see every change as it lands.
private@plc4x.apache.org	Not a public list. Only PMC members and members of the foundation can post to or read it. It is used for the few things that cannot be discussed in public, such as personnel matters and security reports before they are disclosed.

List

What it is for

dev@plc4x.apache.org

The development list. All official discussions happen here: design questions, release votes, proposals and anything else that needs a decision. If you are unsure where something belongs, it belongs here.

issues@plc4x.apache.org

Where the traffic from GitHub Issues goes. Subscribe if you want to follow what is being reported without watching the repository on GitHub.

commits@plc4x.apache.org

Where commits and pull-request related posts go. This is a firehose - useful if you want to see every change as it lands.

private@plc4x.apache.org

Not a public list. Only PMC members and members of the foundation can post to or read it. It is used for the few things that cannot be discussed in public, such as personnel matters and security reports before they are disclosed.

If your mails do not seem to arrive

A mailing list forwards your message on to every subscriber, which means the mail that reaches them was sent by the list rather than directly by you. Mail providers with strict security settings - Proton is one example - tell the rest of the world to treat anything not sent directly by them as suspicious, and the receiving mail services then apply that to the forwarded copy: it can end up in somebody’s spam folder or be quarantined before they ever see it.

The confusing part is that from your side everything looks fine. Your mail is accepted, it shows up in the archives on lists.apache.org, and yet some subscribers never got it and nobody answers.

If that happens to you, the archive is the thing to check first: if your message is there, it reached the list and the problem is on the delivery side rather than something you did wrong.

If you have an Apache account - which you do if you are a committer on at least one Apache project - sign in at lists.apache.org and write your mail from there. It is then sent by the foundation’s own infrastructure instead of being forwarded on from your provider, so it is guaranteed to reach every subscriber.

Without an Apache account, sending from a different address is the usual way around it.

We are aware of this and are working on a solution.

Slack

We have a #plc4x channel on the Apache Slack instance, which is a good place for quick questions that do not warrant a mail to dev@.

If you are a committer on at least one Apache project you can sign yourself up at s.apache.org/slack-invite using your @apache.org address. If you are not, ask one of the active PMC members of the project for an invite.

Slack is convenient, but it is not the record. Anything that needs a decision has to make its way to dev@ - see the note about official discussions above.

GitHub

The project uses GitHub for everything that is code:

GitHub Discussions for questions and open-ended conversations that do not fit a mailing list thread.
GitHub Issues for reporting bugs and requesting features. See Bug & Issue Tracker for more on the issue tracker.
Pull Requests for contributing changes. The contribution guide describes how to prepare one.

Reporting a security issue

Security problems must not be reported through GitHub Issues or any of the public lists. Please follow the process described on the security page instead.