How to make a pull request

Copyright (C) Plasm Team
Distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Updated: April 2019
Source: on github

  • Show a real life example from start to finish on how to do a good PR.

Draft text follows!

It’s hard to start contributing to an open source project. Especially if it’s your first one. We present a flow here for you to follow and will show an example of an actual commit to the codebase. (You can find the commit here and the PR here) This way of working should be good for most projects you commit to, but be sure to check the contribution guidelines for every project. Ours is in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

  1. Fixing the bug.

We found a bug on line 81 of runtime/pz_option.h. There is one l too many. We’ll fix it up so it’s spelt correctly and commit it to git.

  • Use the correct Git commit message structure

  • Show how to clean up your local branches afterwards when it gets accepted.

  • Show how to to additional modifications

  • Maybe some git rebase and squash stuff

Note
 https://github.com/PlasmaLang/plasma/blob/master/runtime/pz_option.h#L81 temporarily has too many 'l’s. This is a good bug to fix and make a PR from.

  • The git message structure documentation is in: https://github.com/PlasmaLang/plasma/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md So make sure to put a reference to it there.

  • From CONTRIBUTING.MD: Log messages should follow the style: 

    ```
[component(s)] Title
    Description
    Any other changes including changes that were needed to support this
change or followed as a consequence of this change.
```
    We provide a .gitmessage in the root of the repository.
Run this command to start using the new commit message template:
    ```
git config --local commit.template /path/to/repo/.gitmessage
```

  • Make sure to mention this and refer to the correct document to refer to in case of doubt. Who knows, this might change again in the future.

  • In CONTRIBUTING.md it says: “Each file should be listed with more detailed information. Take a look at previous changes for examples.” ⇒ We could go look for some good examples and show them in this document. This was removed you can list a summary of changes in each/some files if you think it may help whowever is reviewing your change.