These pages contain information that should be helpful for those developing FOP.

For basic and user information on FOP, please visit the FOP homepage.

It is important to understand that there are currently three lines of development on the FOP product:

• The oldest is the one that releases are currently generated from, and is also called the "maintenance branch". Because of limitations in its design, the FOP committers decided to freeze new development on this branch, and are providing only bug fixes. This branch is tagged as "fop-0_20_2-maintain" in the CVS repository.
• The main development line is the future of FOP. It was spawned from the "maintenance" branch, but had to quickly be "broken" so that the needed redesign could be dropped into place. It is currently not as mature as the "maintenance" branch, but has far greater long-term prospects. It is also known as the "root" or "trunk" or "redesign".
• The "Alt Design" is exactly that: an alternative design approach. Because its efforts are largely complementary and parallel to the main development branch, and because it is expected to be merged at some point into the trunk, it is documented separately. The authors of this effort are currently in the process of merging their work into the trunk.

Please note that patches for enhancements to the maintenance branch will generally not be considered. Bug fixes are welcome there, but new developers are strongly encouraged to apply their efforts to the trunk development line.

Because there is a fair amount of common information between the maintenance and trunk development lines, we attempt to document them together, highlighting differences only where needed.