CONTRIBUTING.md

April 26, 2021 ยท View on GitHub

Example Workflow for Contributing

(provided by @spytheman)

(If you don't already have a GitHub account, please create one. Your GitHub username will be referred to later as 'YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME'. Change it accordingly in the steps below.)

  1. Fork https://github.com/vlang/vmd using GitHub's interface to your own account. Let's say that the forked repository is at https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/vmd .

  2. Clone the main vmd repository https://github.com/vlang/vmd to a local folder on your computer, say named vmd/ (git clone https://github.com/vlang/vmd vmd)

  3. cd vmd

  4. git remote add pullrequest https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/vmd NB: the remote named pullrequest should point to YOUR own forked repo, not the main vmd repository! After this, your local cloned repository is prepared for making pullrequests, and you can just do normal git operations such as: git pull git status and so on.

  5. When finished with a feature/bugfix/change, you can: git checkout -b fix_alabala

  6. git push pullrequest # (NOTE: the pullrequest remote was setup on step 4)

  7. On GitHub's web interface, go to: https://github.com/vlang/vmd/pulls

    Here the UI shows a dialog with a button to make a new pull request based on the new pushed branch. (Example dialog: https://url4e.com/gyazo/images/364edc04.png)

  8. After making your pullrequest (aka, PR), you can continue to work on the branch fix_alabala ... just do again git push pullrequest when you have more commits.

  9. If there are merge conflicts, or a branch lags too much behind vmd's master, you can do the following:

    1. git pull --rebase origin master # solve conflicts and do git rebase --continue
    2. git push pullrequest -f # this will overwrite your current remote branch with the updated version of your changes.

The point of doing the above steps, is to never directly push to the main vmd repository, only to your own fork. Since your local master branch tracks the main vmd repository's master, then git checkout master, as well as git pull --rebase origin master will continue to work as expected (these are actually used by v up) and git can always do it cleanly.

Git is very flexible, so there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. See the GitHub flow, for more information.

Using Github's hub CLI tool

You can download the hub tool from https://hub.github.com/ . Using hub, you will not need to go through the (sometimes) slow website to make PRs. Most remote operations can be done through the hub CLI command.

NB: You still need to have a GitHub account.

Preparation:

(steps 1..3 need to be done just once):

  1. hub clone vlang/vmd my_vmd

  2. cd my_vmd

  3. hub fork --remote-name pullrequest

  4. git checkout -b my_cool_feature # Step 4 is better done once per each new feature/bugfix that you make.

Improve vmd by making commits:

  1. git commit -am "math: add a new function copysign"

Testing your commits locally:

You can test locally whether your changes have not broken something by running: ./bin/test. See README.md for more details.

Publishing your commits to GitHub:

  1. git push pullrequest

Making a PR with hub:

(so that your changes can be merged to the main vmd repository)

  1. hub pull-request

Optionally, you can track the status of your PR CI tests with:

  1. hub ci-status --verbose

Fixing failing tests:

If everything is OK, after some minutes, the CI tests should pass for all platforms. If not, visit the URLs for the failing CI jobs, see which tests have failed and then fix them by making more changes. Just use git push pullrequest to publish your changes. The CI tests will run with your updated code. Use hub ci-status --verbose to monitor their status.