External contributor memo

Useful tip and tricks for external contributors.

Communication

Make sure to have subscribed to the developer mailing list in order to contact all the other contributors (including official commiters) and discuss technical points.

Contributing code

• Fork the required repositories

• Make sure to have an Eclipse account and accepted the Eclipse contributor agreement in your profile.

• Prepare your contribution (ideally in separate branches if you plan to propose several contributions)

• Make sure that every commit you propose has the Signed-off-by information in the comment

  This can be enforced automatically in eclipse by setting the preferences (in Team>Git>Committing tick the "insert Signed-off-by" check box).

• Configure your fork to keep synchronization in order to minimize conflicts https://help.github.com/articles/configuring-a-remote-for-a-fork/ and https://help.github.com/articles/syncing-a-fork/

  ⚠️ I advice you to not use "upstream" as name for your remote, because it may lead to confusion in Eclipse user interface where the upstream keyword is also used in the popup menu of local branches in order pull/fetch from the main remote.

  I prefer using "eclipse_upstream" in order to clarify the remotes.

  ex:

dvojtise@ubuntu:~/git/dvojtise/gemoc-studio$ git remote -v
origin	git@github.com:dvojtise/gemoc-studio.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:dvojtise/gemoc-studio.git (push)
dvojtise@ubuntu:~/git/dvojtise/gemoc-studio$ git remote add eclipse_upstream git@github.com:eclipse/gemoc-studio.git
dvojtise@ubuntu:~/git/dvojtise/gemoc-studio$ git remote -v
eclipse_upstream	git@github.com:eclipse/gemoc-studio.git (fetch)
eclipse_upstream	git@github.com:eclipse/gemoc-studio.git (push)
origin	git@github.com:dvojtise/gemoc-studio.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:dvojtise/gemoc-studio.git (push)

• Open a Pull Request for your contribution.