librelist archives

Contributing to Homebrew: git-related questions

From:

Anand Buddhdev

Date:

2011-09-20 @ 12:53

Hello brewers,

I've just started using Homebrew, and I love the concept. It's easier to
work with and understand than MacPorts.

I've noticed that some formulae are outdated, and I want to contribute and
update them. I read the wiki instructions for contributing, and tried to
update 2 formulae, and ran into some issues. I'm afraid I don't know enough
about git, so I hope you don't mind me asking about it here.

So I've got a standard brew installation, and I've run "brew update" to get
the latest version of brew and all the formulae.

I then edited one formulae, for the unbound package, and committed the
change. When I tried to push the change to my fork of Homebrew, I got an
error relating to fast-forward, which I guess happened because the master
Homebrew repository had seen commits in the meantime.

So how can I keep my standard Homebrew installation and my forked copy in
Github in sync with the master Homebrew repository, so that I don't get
these errors? (in the previous case when I got the errors, I fixed it by
deleting my repository completely, and re-forking it; that's just wasteful).

Regards,

Anand

Check someone hasn't already updated the formula but it's waiting to be 
merged by searching the issue tracker.

If you need the updates you can `brew pull PULL_REQUEST_URL` to get the 
changes in advance.

> Hello brewers,
> 
> I've just started using Homebrew, and I love the concept. It's easier to
work with and understand than MacPorts.
> 
> I've noticed that some formulae are outdated, and I want to contribute 
and update them. I read the wiki instructions for contributing, and tried 
to update 2 formulae, and ran into some issues. I'm afraid I don't know 
enough about git, so I hope you don't mind me asking about it here.
> 
> So I've got a standard brew installation, and I've run "brew update" to 
get the latest version of brew and all the formulae.
> 
> I then edited one formulae, for the unbound package, and committed the 
change. When I tried to push the change to my fork of Homebrew, I got an 
error relating to fast-forward, which I guess happened because the master 
Homebrew repository had seen commits in the meantime.
> 
> So how can I keep my standard Homebrew installation and my forked copy 
in Github in sync with the master Homebrew repository, so that I don't get
these errors? (in the previous case when I got the errors, I fixed it by 
deleting my repository completely, and re-forking it; that's just 
wasteful).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Anand

On Sep 20, 2011, at 8:53 AM, Anand Buddhdev wrote:

> I then edited one formulae, for the unbound package, and committed the 
change. When I tried to push the change to my fork of Homebrew, I got an 
error relating to fast-forward, which I guess happened because the master 
Homebrew repository had seen commits in the meantime.

When I got these errors, I was trying too hard, and these errors were 
specific about what git commands I shouldn't be using.

You want to create a git branch that will be your pull request, and make 
exactly the changes needed to fix a single formula. Then don't worry about
keeping this branch in sync. Unless a conflicting change is introduced to 
Homebrew, it will always be possible to apply the changes represented by 
this branch, to the current development head of Homebrew.

Git really works fiendishly well, compared to other version control 
software I've used. I found it helpful to read some tutorials, and I 
switched to git for everything.