[lyo-dev] Some Git and Gerrit tips

[Michael Fiedler <fiedler.mf@xxxxxxxxx>]

A few Git and Gerrit tips for Lyo developers.   Some of this is covered on the contributors Getting Started page, but thought it would be worth mentioning here as well.

1.  Setting up a connection to Gerrit.   Gerrit is the preferred way to contribute code to Lyo.   Life will be much simpler for both you and the committers if you use Gerrit instead of submitting patches.

   a) Go to https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/settings/ and sign in with your Bugzilla email/passwd and click Profile to see your Gerrit username to use when configuring your connection.   This is different from your Bugzilla username.

   b) You can use https or ssh for your connection.   I've had the best luck getting folks set up with ssh.   You will need a public key and register it with Gerrit.   See http://wiki.eclipse.org/Gerrit#SSH_Keys for info on generating SSH keys from the command line (usually Linux or Mac users) or from EGit (any users, especially Windows).

  c) After cloning a Lyo Git repo, go to the Git repositories view and expand the repo you are interested (e.g. org.eclipse.lyo.core), right click Remotes and add a new remote.   Give the remote a name like "Gerrit".

  d) Configure the remote for push.   If you are using ssh, the URL should look like this:  ssh://<userid>@git.eclipse.org:29418/lyo/org.eclipse.lyo.core.git where <username> is your Gerrit username.

  e) Important:  Make sure you add a Ref mapping that looks like this:  HEAD:refs/for/<branch> where <branch> is where your commit is targeted for - usually master.

See this image for a correctly configured Gerrit Push:  http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/a/ab/Lyo_Gerrit_Config.png

2.  Amending commits.   Git and EGit have a nice feature called amend.  This allows you to add a new change to your last commit (or update the commit message).   This is useful if your change has not yet been merged into Eclipse master repo.    It also works well with Gerrit - if you get review comments you can update your code, amend the commit and the next push to Gerrit will show it as a new Patch Set on your Gerrit review record.

In EGit:  The commit dialog has a widget to amend the previous commit.

On the command line:  git commit --amend

3.  Finally, a suggested workflow for making contributions to Lyo can be found here:  http://wiki.eclipse.org/Lyo/ContributorsGettingStarted#Suggested_Git_workflow_for_making_a_change_in_Lyo

I hope this info is useful.  I'll update the contributors guide with the info not yet there.

Regards,

Mike