Introduction

GitHub hosts the AROS central "repository", which is the main database containing the published common codebase of the project.

Individual developers are encouraged to create forks of the project and issue pull requests to have changes merged back into the project. This allows them to have their own "working copies", which are local copies of the database from a specific time, together with local changes that haven't yet been pushed to the central repository.

When a developer wants to share his changes with the rest of the team, he simply "commits" his changes to the fork using the client program, and issues a pull request to the main repository.

The software

Logging into the server

Unlike CVS, you don't have to log into the server. Instead, when Git needs to know your login and password, it will ask them.

Getting the AROS sources

To get a copy of the AROS sources you use the "clone" command, like this:

> git clone https://github.com/aros-development-team/AROS.git

This will create a directory called AROS and populate it with all the sources, which might take quite some time if you have a slow network connection.

In addition to the main repository, there are also the "contrib" and "ports" repositories, containing third-party programs that have been ported to AROS. They can be checked out to include in the AROS build as follows:

> cd AROS
> mkdir contrib
> mkdir ports
> git clone https://github.com/aros-development-team/contrib.git
> git clone https://github.com/aros-development-team/ports.git

Preparing the sources to build

After cloning the repository(s), git must be told to initialize the submodules that are included in the cloned repository. To do this run the following command in the cloned tree

> git submodule update --init --recursive

Getting the extra sources

Apart from the AROS main sources which we checked out in the previous section, there are also other things on the Git server not directly related to the core of the operating system. For example, the "binaries" module which contains images like screenshots, backdrops and similar, and the "documentation" module which contains the sources to the website.

Updating the sources

After having checked out the sources, you will probably want to periodically update them to get the latest changes the other developers have committed. For this you use the "pull" command:

> cd AROS
> git pull

This will merge any changes that other developers have made into your sources and also check out new directories and files that have been added. If someone committed changes to a file that you also have changed locally, Git will try to merge the changes automatically. If both of you changed the same lines Git might fail in merging the sources. When this happens, Git will complain and put both versions in the file separated by <<<<. You need to edit the file and resolve the conflict manually. Once this is done, you also need to use the "git add" and "git commit" command to tell Git that all is well.

Committing changes

If you have made some changes and feel that you want to share your work with the other developers, you should commit your changes:

> git add <file>
> git commit -m "import changes"
> git push

If you have forked you have to create pull requests as explained in the Introduction.

Further reading

• Pro Git book
• Github help
• Git documentation

Sources

Those interested in the sources only, should also be able to download them from the Sources section of the Nightly builds page.