I recently tried contributing to a new project again, and I was quite surprised which hurdles can be in your way, when you did not setup your environment, yet.
So I decided to put together a small test for the basic workflow: Cloning a project, doing and testing a change and pushing it back.
I did that for Git and Mercurial, because both break at different points.
I’ll express the basic usecase in Subversion:
- svn checkout [project]
- (hack, test, repeat)
- (request commit rights)
- svn commit -m "added X"
You can also replace the request for commit rights with creating a patch and sending it to a mailing list. But let’s take the easiest case of a new contributor who is directly welcomed into the project as trusted committer.
A slightly more advanced workflow adds testing in a clean tree. In Subversion it looks almost like the simple commit: