A Noob’s Intro to using Git for Open Source SUBHRAJYOTI SEN 

Who Am I? Subhrajyoti Sen • Open Source Enthusiast • Mozillian • Android Developer • Net Neutrality and Privacy advocate 

What is Open Source The term "open source" refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. 

Some Famous Open Source Projects 

Why Contribute to Open Source • Amazing Learning Opportunities • Amazing Communities • Big Plus on CV • You can go places. Literally • You get direct credits 

Contribution Guidelines source: youtube-dl For the repository owner, contribution guidelines are a way to communicate how people should contribute. For contributors, the guidelines help them verify that they're submitting well-formed pull requests and opening useful issues. - GitHub 

Writing Proper Commit Messages • No swear words • Get straight to the point • Proper references • Write messages that you can understand a year down the line • Commit message length can vary from two sentences to multiple paragraphs 

Writing Proper Commit Messages 

Maintaining Authorship • The person making the changes in the commit is the author • It’s always OK to use someone's commit in your project but with authorship • It’s NOT OK to change authorship of a commit git commit --amend --author="Name " 

Cherry Picking • Apply an existing commit to your project • The part modified by the commit should have a similar structure to the existing project • Automatically maintains authorship • Used extensively in Linux kernel and AOSP development 

Cherry Picking – How? Cherry-pick is 2-step process 1. Fetching • git fetch remote branch 2. Cherry Picking • git cherry-pick 

Hard Reset • Rewrite commit history • Useful for “remove password” situation • Needs a force push git reset --hard 

Force pushing • With great power comes great responsibility • When in doubt, use it with supervision • Never do it in production code git push –f remote branch 

Squashing • Combine multiple commits into a single commit • Better readability of commit history • Always suggested while making a PR for a single issue git reset --soft HEAD~X git commit –m “New commit message” 

Pull Request 1. Fork 2. Clone 3. Commit 4. Push 5. Make Pull Request 6. Repeat 

Merge Conflicts Sometimes there are competing changes that Git needs your help with to decide which changes to incorporate in the final merge. Often, merge conflicts happen when people make different changes to the same line of the same file, or when one person edits a file and another person deletes the same file. 

Rebasing Useful when to update a fork 1. git checkout target-branch 2. git pull upstream target-branch 3. git checkout victim-branch 4. git rebase target-branch 5. git push –f origin victim-branch 

How to Find your First Bug Some amazing resources to find your first bug to solve • http://up-for-grabs.net • http://issuehub.io • GitHub Search: easy, low hanging fruit, beginner • @first_tmrs_only 

THANK YOU @iamsubhrajyoti @SubhrajyotiSen