Submitting Patches

The purpose of this document is to assist those who may be less familiar with git in submitting patches upstream. While git is powerful, it can be somewhat confusing to those who don’t use it regularly (and even those who do).

Note

We prefer more in-depth commit messages than those given below which are purely for brevity in this guide. See http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html for more about creating proper git commit messages.

Github

These steps outline one way of submitting patches via Github. First, you will want to fork the upstream Bcfg2 repository.

Create a local branch

Once you have forked the upstream repository, you should clone a local copy (where <YOUR USERNAME> is your github username).

git clone git@github.com:<YOUR USERNAME>/bcfg2.git

Create a local feature/bugfix branch off the appropriate upstream branch. For example, let’s say we want to submit a bugfix for bcfg2-info against the 1.2.x series. We can create a fix-bcfg2-info branch which is a copy of the maint-1.2 branch.

git branch fix-bcfg2-info maint-1.2
git checkout fix-bcfg2-info

Commit changes to your local branch

Next make whatever changes need to be made and commit them to the fix-bcfg2-info branch.

git add src/sbin/bcfg2-info
git commit -m "Fix bcfg2-info bug"

Now you need to push your fix-bcfg2-info branch to github.

git push origin fix-bcfg2-info

Submit pull request

Next, submit a pull request against the proper branch (in this case, https://github.com/username/bcfg2/pull/new/fix-bcfg2-info – again, username is your github username). At the top of the pull request, you can edit the upstream branch you are targetting so that you create the pull request against the proper upstream branch (in this case, maint-1.2).

All that’s left to do is to write up a description of your pull request and click Send pull request. Since your local branch is specific to this fix, you can add additional commits if needed and push them. They will automatically be added to the pull request.

Remove local branch

Once we have merged your pull request, you can safely delete your local feature/bugfix branch. To do so, you must first checkout a different branch.

git checkout master  # switch to a different branch
git branch -d fix-bcfg2-info  # delete your local copy of fix-bcfg2-info
git push origin :fix-bcfg2-info  # delete fix-bcfg2-info from github

Mailing List

The following lists the steps needed to use git’s facilities for emailing patches to the mailing list.

Commit changes to your local clone

For example, let’s say we want to fix a big in bcfg2-info. For the 1.2.x series.

git clone https://github.com/Bcfg2/bcfg2.git
git checkout maint-1.2
# make changes
git add src/sbin/bcfg2-info
git commit -m "Fix bcfg2-info bug"

Setup git for gmail (optional)

If you would like to use the GMail SMTP server, you can add the following to your ~/.gitconfig file as per the git-send-email(1) manpage.

[sendemail]
        smtpencryption = tls
        smtpserver = smtp.gmail.com
        smtpuser = yourname@gmail.com
        smtpserverport = 587

Format patches

Use git to create patches formatted for email with the following.

git format-patch --cover-letter -M origin/maint-1.2 -o outgoing/

Send emails to the mailing list

Edit outgoing/0000-* and then send your emails to the mailing list (bcfg-dev@lists.mcs.anl.gov):

git send-email outgoing/*