Thank you for your willingness to contribute to the Trilinos project. The procedure to do so is the following:
Navigate to Trilinos' GitHub Issues page and create a new issue. The issue can be used for any number of things—reporting a bug, suggesting an enhancement, posing a question, etc. On the new issue creation page, you'll notice the Description field will be pre-populated with some text. Follow the instructions in that template to give us as much information as you can such that we can tackle the issue as soon as is practicable.
When work is ready to commence on an issue, the workflow to use is the following:
- If you have not already done so, create a fork of Trilinos on GitHub under your username.
- Clone your fork of Trilinos with
git clone git@github.com:<username>/Trilinos
. - Each time you clone your fork,
git remote add upstream git@github.com:trilinos/Trilinos
to add the original Trilinos repository as theupstream
remote.
To keep your master
and develop
branches up-to-date with those from upstream
:
git fetch --all
git checkout master
git merge upstream/master
git push origin master
git checkout develop
git merge upstream/develop
git push origin develop
You want to do this before starting work on a new feature branch.
Note: Updating
master
is not strictly necessary, as all development work is done off ofdevelop
.
Create a local branch off of develop
on which to make your changes:
git checkout develop
git checkout -b <branchName>
<branchName>
can be whatever you like, though we have some recommendations:
- Include the issue number in it in some way, for instance,
123-<restOfBranchName>
, or<restOfBranchName>-123
. - Make the branch name descriptive; that is, avoid
fixSomeStuff
,performanceTweaks
, and generic names along those lines. - To indicate your branch is intended solely for your own use, preface the branch name with your username, as in
<username>/<restOfBranchName>
.
Do whatever work is necessary to address the issue you're tackling, breaking your work into logical, compilable commits. Feel free to commit small chunks early and often in your local repository and then use git rebase -i
to reorganize your commits before sharing. Make sure the commit messages you will be sharing reference the appropriate GitHub issue numbers.
While working on your feature in your local <branchName>
branch, other commits will likely make it into the real Trilinos develop
branch. There are a variety of ways to merge these changes into your local feature branch. One possibility is
git checkout <branchName>
git fetch --all
git merge upstream/develop
though there are others that are equally valid.
When your changes are ready to be integrated into Trilinos' develop
branch:
- Push your local feature branch up to your fork with
git push -u origin <branchName>
. - Navigate to your fork of Trilinos on GitHub and create a new pull request:
- Be sure you choose:
- base fork:
trilinos/Trilinos
- base:
develop
- head fork:
<username>/Trilinos
- compare:
<branchName>
- base fork:
- On the new pull request creation page, you'll notice the Description field will be pre-populated with some text. Follow the instructions in that template to give us as much information as you can such that we can review and approve the issue as soon as is practicable.
- Be sure you choose:
At this point you'll enter into a stage where you and various Trilinos developers will iterate back and forth until your changes are in an acceptable state and can be merged in. If you need to make changes to your pull request, make additional commits on your <branchName>
branch and push them up to your fork. Make sure you don't delete your remote feature branch or your fork of Trilinos before your pull request has been merged.