The first step in getting involved with the Eclipse projects is understanding how they work. The Eclipse plug-ins all come with source code and the IDE is self-sufficient for debugging and developing plug-in code. It's possible to view this source code for debugging purposes or to import the source code for modification processes, without needing to talk to remote Eclipse sites.

However, being able to fix bugs and provide patches upstream helps improve Eclipse for everyone; and once the fix has been identified, using Bugzilla to create a bug and Gerrit to receive the patch is the next logical step.

This chapter has shown how to follow all of these steps to be able to contribute to Eclipse. The rest is up to you.