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Using GitHub

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Chris edited this page Apr 26, 2014 · 2 revisions

This document was appropriated from Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead's repo.

Contribute

To contribute, fork the repository here on Github, make your changes, then send a pull request for review of the code by the other party.

Guidelines

There are a couple of guidelines we suggest sticking to:

  • Add this repository as an upstream remote.
  • Keep your master branch clean. This means you can easily pull changes made to this repository into yours.
  • Create a new branch for each new feature or set of related bug fixes.
  • Never merge from your local branches into your master branch. Only update that by pulling from upstream/master.

Code style

Our policy is yet to be written up. For now, be generally clean and consistent with your indentations, comments, and so on.

Doxygen comments

Doxygen generates documentation. We may employ it at some point.

Helpful pages:

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/commands.html

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/commands.html

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/commands.html

Guidelines for adding documentation

  • Doxygen comments should describe behaviour as found on the outside, not the implementation. However, it may be somewhat necessary to describe implementation at times.
  • Describe things that aren't obvious, as if foreign eyes are your audience.
  • Don't describe redundantly. E.g. /** Map is not a helpful comment.
  • When documenting something, describe how it interacts with other components, not just what it itself does.

Building the documentation for viewing locally

  • Install doxygen
  • doxygen doxygen_doc/doxygen_conf.txt
  • chrome doxygen_doc/html/index.html (replace chrome with your browser of choice)

Example workflow

Setup your environment

(This only needs to be done once.)

  1. Fork the repository here on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally.

     $ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/wakarimasen.git
 # Clones your fork of the repository into the current directory in terminal.

  3. Add this repository as a remote.

     $ cd wakarimasen
 # Changes the active directory in the prompt to the newly cloned "wakarimasen" directory
 $ git remote add -f upstream https://github.com/Asialaide/wakarimasen.git
 # Assigns the original repository to a remote called "upstream"

Update your master branch

  1. Make sure you have your master branch checked out.

     $ git checkout master

  2. Pull the changes from the upstream/master branch.

     $ git pull --ff-only upstream master
 # Gets changes from the "master" branch on the "upstream" remote

Make your changes

  1. Update your master branch, if you haven't already.

  2. For each new feature or bug fix, create a new branch.

     $ git branch new_feature
 # Creates a new branch called "new_feature"
 $ git checkout new_feature
 # Makes "new_feature" the active branch

  3. Once you've committed some changes locally, you need to push them to your fork here on GitHub.

     $ git push origin new_feature
 # Origin was automatically set to point to your fork when you cloned it

  4. Once you've finished working on your branch, and have committed and pushed all your changes, submit a pull request from your new_feature branch to this repository's master branch.

  • Note: Any new commits to the new_feature branch on GitHub will automatically be included in the pull request, so make sure to only commit related changes to the same branch.

Pull Request notes

  • Mark pull requests that are still being worked on with [WIP] at the end of the title
    • When a pull request is ready to be reviewed remove the [WIP]
  • Mark pull requests that need commenting / testing by others with [CR]

Advanced Techniques

These guidelines aren't essential, but they can make keeping things in order much easier.

Using remote tracking branches

Remote tracking branches allow you to easily stay in touch with this repository's master branch, as they automatically know which remote branch to get changes from.

$ git branch -vv
* master      xxxx [origin/master] ....
  new_feature xxxx ....

Here you can see we have two branches; master which is tracking origin/master, and new_feature which isn't tracking any branch. In practice, what this means is that git won't know where to get changes from.

$ git checkout new_feature
Switched to branch 'new_feature'
$ git pull
There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with.

In order to easily pull changes from upstream/master into the new_feature branch, we can tell git which branch it should track. (You can even do this for your local master branch.)

$ git branch -u upstream/master new_feature
Branch new_feature set up to track remote branch master from upstream.
$ git pull
Updating xxxx..xxxx
....

You can also set the tracking information at the same time as creating the branch.

$ git branch new_feature_2 --track upstream/master
Branch new_feature_2 set up to track remote branch master from upstream.

  • Note: Although this makes it easier to pull from upstream/master, it doesn't change anything with regards to pushing. git push fails because you don't have permission to push to upstream/master.

     $ git push
 error: The requested URL returned error: 403 while accessing https://github.com/Asialaide/wakarimasen.git
 fatal: HTTP request failed
 $ git push origin
 ....
 To https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/wakarimasen.git
 xxxx..xxxx  new_feature -> new_feature

Frequently Asked Questions

####Why does git pull --ff-only result in an error?

If git pull --ff-only shows an error, it means that you've committed directly to your local master branch. To fix this, we create a new branch with these commits, find the point at which we diverged from upstream/master, and then reset master to that point.

$ git pull --ff-only upstream master
From https://github.com/Asialaide/wakarimasen
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting.
$ git branch new_branch master          # mark the current commit with a tmp branch
$ git merge-base master upstream/master
cc31d0... # the last commit before we committed directly to master
$ git reset --hard cc31d0....
HEAD is now at cc31d0... ...

Now that master has been cleaned up, we can easily pull from upstream/master, and then continue working on new_branch.

$ git pull --ff-only upstream master
# gets changes from the "upstream" remote for the matching branch, in this case "master"
$ git checkout new_branch

Clone this wiki locally