ECLiPSe has a lot of functionality, and therefore many components, from IDE, over compiler, runtime system, constraint solver, devlopment tools, libraries to third-party software interfaces. Although various Constraint Solving software has appeared over the last years, ECLiPSe remains one of the most versatile systems, supporting many different techniques, and providing much flexibility to tailor algorithms and experiment with different methods. It serves also as a glue-system to integrate more specialised third party solvers such as COIN software or Gecode.
ECLiPSe is currently maintained by Joachim Schimpf and Kish Shen with support from Coninfer Ltd. Both maintainers have been involved with the system for a long time, keep everything running, and continue development. Nevertheless, many ideas for improvements and additional functionality remain in the pipeline.
As ECLiPSe has been open source since 2006, and an academic user community has been around since the 1990s, there are many areas where you can contribute even without having in-depth kowledge of the whole system:
Is there an ECLiPSe library that you use a lot and are familiar with? You can help with testing, bug fixing, and making it more user friendly by adding documentation or missing functionality.
We need help with regular binary builds for less common architectures and operating systems. Also, if you are familiar with installers or the various Linux packaging systems, this is where you can help.
Do you have code that could be useful for others? Have you written a new constraint solver? Wrap it up as a library, add some documentation and tests, licence it under the MPL (alternatively BSD or LGPL-2), and become a contributor! Examples of past contributions are the Sbds, Sbdd and Ldsb symmetry breaking libraries, the Cardinal set solver and the Grasper graph solver.
ECLiPSe has a lot of documentation, but the relevant bits are not always easy to find, or easy to read. If you have a good way of explaining something, or if you have developed teaching materials or programming examples that you would like to see more widely used, please consider sharing them!
If good ideas are turned into good concrete proposals, chances are that someone will take an interest and turn them into reality.
Calling all Java and GUI wizards - we have an ECLiPSe/eclipse plugin called Saros which brings the tkeclipse functionality into the eclipse IDE framework. It is in need of a maintainer and developer, who can bring it into a state where it can replace the tkeclipse GUI.
System components are in different states of maturity (refer to the status line in the library reference documentation).
Post to the mailing list or email one of the main developers (jschimpf or kish_shen at users sf net) directly, they are very nice people (most of the time...)