If you think you'd like to contribute, you can access the sources in our git repository as explained here. Then come share your ideas (and/or patches) in the Developer Forum. You can also browse existing defects or enhancement requests in the Issue Tracker to see if there's work that needs to be done. You can also ask and answer questions on the relatively new users mailing list.
Getting the Code
Source code is available via anonymous git as follows:
> git clone git://beet.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/beet/beet ./beet
Building
The following tools are required to build beet:
Obtaining EasyAnt is likely to be the biggest challenge for most developers. It is a gestating build system, based on Ant and Ivy, and at the moment you will have to check it out from source control,
> svn co http://svn.easyant.org/trunk ./easyant
Yes, you will also need Subversion in order to obtain EasyAnt. Welcome to the bleeding edge :). When you have EasyAnt, follow these installation instructions to configure your build environment.
Once you have all of these tools installed on your system, you can use easyant to execute a complete build from the command line:
/beet> easyant meta:verify-all
This will generate jars and release packages in the directory target/repository. Subsequent calls to meta:verify-all will perform incremental recompiles. If you want to do a full rebuild, run a clean first:
/beet> easyant meta:clean-allEditing
Beet is developed using Eclipse 3.5 ("Galileo"). Project files are included in source control, so you can easily import them into your Eclipse workspace if you wish. The included project files require you to have installed the IvyDE plugin. If you do not want to install IvyDE, you will just have to add the third-party jars from the release package to your project classpath. You can configure IvyDE to use the included ivysettings.xml file, beet/src/build/ant/ivysettings.xml.