=========== Development

The Fabric development team is headed by Jeff Forcier <https://bitprophet.org>, aka bitprophet. However, dozens of other developers pitch in by submitting patches and ideas via GitHub issues and pull requests <https://github.com/fabric/fabric>, :ref:IRC <irc> or the mailing list <http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fab-user>_.

Get the code

Please see the :ref:source-code-checkouts section of the :doc:installing page for details on how to obtain Fabric's source code.

Contributing

There are a number of ways to get involved with Fabric:

• Use Fabric and send us feedback! This is both the easiest and arguably the most important way to improve the project -- let us know how you currently use Fabric and how you want to use it. (Please do try to search the ticket tracker_ first, though, when submitting feature ideas.)
• Report bugs or submit feature requests. We follow contribution-guide.org <https://contribution-guide.org>'s guidelines, so please check them out before visiting the ticket tracker.

.. _ticket tracker: https://github.com/fabric/fabric/issues

While we may not always reply promptly, we do try to make time eventually to inspect all contributions and either incorporate them or explain why we don't feel the change is a good fit.

Support of older releases

Major and minor releases do not usually mark the end of the previous line or lines of development:

• Recent minor release branches typically continue to receive critical bugfixes, often extending back two or three release lines (so e.g. if 2.4 was the currently active release line, 2.3 and perhaps even 2.2 might get patches).
• Depending on the nature of bugs found and the difficulty in backporting them, older release lines may also continue to get bugfixes -- but there's no guarantee of any kind. Thus, if a bug were found in 2.4 that affected 2.1 and could be easily applied, a new 2.1.x version might be released.