I and my friend want to work on an open source project which is hosted/worked on via git.
I tried to follow many links on google but could not comeup with a precise/exact way of collaborating easily.
We both have github account and want to be able to create a branch (or whatever its called) exactly as that of the project we want to work on (share) and then make changes to it. So when the changes are ready, we can ask the project folks to have a look and integrate our work easily.
We both also want to track what changes we individually make in our local check-out. So that when it get pushed to the project, we know who worked on what.
Can some on please guide me?
As the project already exists on github…
Either 1) Get added as collaborators or 2) ‘fork’ it and then submit a ‘pull request’ for your changes.
Next, clone the repository (either the main one if you are a collabortor, or the one under your username if you have forked) by clicking on the ‘copy’ icon on github and then locally do git clone -paste- (shift-control-v pastes in a terminal window).
This gets the repository and makes a local copy which means both all the files that you normally see and also the ‘actual’ git repository ‘behind the scenes’ which is through the .git (hidden file) structure. It’s actually this structure that you add and commit files to before pushing them to remote repositories.
So when you are a collaborator you can push and pull to the central repository, otherwise it’s “to” your fork.
If you do a fork for all this, you end by add/commit your changes locally, then pushing them to github (it’s your fork at this point though). They you (in github) click on “pull request” for your fork page and that submits a notice to the source repository maintainer that you have changes you would like to submit”.
So think of immediate commits for code that is pushed when you are a collaborator – and THAT’s when you probably want to branch (locally) as you can made those changes separately from the main code base initially. You can still git push these branches to the main github repository though.
If you’re just getting started with all this you may also find gitx (Mac) or gitg (Linux) to be amazing visual tools for all this. You get to see who worked on what very easily as you require. I called it the ‘london undergroud viewer” !