I suspect that this as something to do with the recent gitPAN upload to Github and therefore is probably some automated service that is going through related projects making sure that Github CPAN projects do have the meta repository tag populated in the build process.

NB. I blogged about this repository link back in May but forgot to put my changes live. *blush*

This contribution was the necessary nudge I needed to find out how to use git to merge in external changes. Github itself did seem to provide a web option to apply this change directly under “Fork Queue”. However I wanted to do it all via git so first place I looked is the Github documention on pull requests.

My local directory was up-to-date so I just needed to do the following to pull & merge into my code:

• git pull git://github.com/cpanservice/builder.git master

All merged and committed (see PS). Quick check of diffs & logs and then just needed to populate it back to Github:

• git push origin master

You will see cpanservice changes immediately in the commits. However the Github graphs and fork queue take a little while to be updated to show the merge.

/I3az/

PS. The merged cpanservice changes showed up under me in the network graph (see red line below) despite showing up correctly under commits.

I think this is because I merge changes locally and then pushed back to Github? Its not an issue for these cpanservice changes but I would like to get it right for “proper” contributors.

So I think the alternate merge example documented by Github might be the better approach?

git remote add defunkt git://github.com/defunkt/grit.git
git fetch defunkt
git merge defunkt/master

This will be the first time I’ve “properly” contributed in some form to an opensource project (“properly” being via source control management & a patch).

Devel::Declare is hosted on Github here. And the process to contribute back changes to a Github project is “forking” simple!

With Git & Github its all about forking. Here is a concise Github howto (which I’ll regurgitate below with my own slant & spiel!).

I only use Git for my Github projects, so forking etc is all new to me. To break it down into a few simple steps the process to contribute would be:

• Fork project
• Clone your fork
• Make your changes
• Push changes back to you fork
• Send pull request back to original project

Here are the minutiae steps I went through for Devel::Declare:

• Went to Devel::Declare project on Github and forked it.
• Forked project now appears in my project list.
• Cloned my forked Devel::Declare (use “Your Clone URL” copy/paste)
  git clone git@github.com:draegtun/devel-declare.git
cd devel-declare/


• Linked my forked project to original
  git remote add upstream git://github.com/rafl/devel-declare.git
git fetch upstream


• Make my changes to project
• Run tests (in case I did something stupid!)
  perl Makefile.PL
make
make test


• Clear down build once happy
  make realclean

• Push my changes back to my fork
  git commit -a -m "Documentation added to D::D::Context::Simple + examples directory"
git push origin master


Now on Github the changes can be seen in my fork

All I do now is click the “pull request” button and off went a request of my changes to rafl. Fingers cross my documentation changes were good enough to be accepted.

So I’m no longer a virgin to contributing to this opensource malarky

/I3az/

Anyway good news… nothing was lost (phew!) and GitHub is now available again (yippee!).

/I3az/