best/safest practice for interacting with github

[Ernie Rael]

Many thanks Kevin. Your response will be a dog eared reference for me.

I already had a path for NB which I experimented with 'hg in' and 'hg 
pull'. I changed the name to upstream for doc (and memory trigger). And 
your workflow example is invaluable, especially that bookmark/branch.

You use netbeans.git, I don't have the ".git" extension. Is there some 
magic, or is it a naming convention?

The example has 'hg push -r mybranch', why not '... -B mybranch'? I 
guess they're equivalent in this case.

When you say

    hg-git [has issues so] ... don't rewrite ... changes you've already
    pushed

I think of pushing a change, then needing to revise it after review and 
wanting to 'hg squash'. Should I wait till (not if, when) that happens? 
Are there things I can do beforehand to minimize potential problems? Or 
maybe some light reading so those workarounds don't come as a total shock:-)

-ernie

On 11/18/2019 11:48 AM, Kevin Bullock wrote:

>> On Nov 18, 2019, at 11:27, Ernie Rael <err at raelity.com> wrote:
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> It's been over 5 years, but I am again going to work with NetBeans source, do some pull requests... It is now on github. I've never used git. I used hggit to clone the repo; then made a github fork, moved my path to my fork. Cool, so far seems OK.
>>
>> Now I'm looking at the NB docs and see stuff like "then do 'git config --global user.name "John Doe"' " and also a cmd for email. The 'git remote add upstream ...' so I can submit PULL REQUESTS certainly has me confused.
> You can use your clone directly to contribute. The Mercurial equivalent of the `git remote add upstream ...` command they list is adding another entry under [paths] in your .hg/hgrc (the config file in the your local clone). So you'd end up with something like:
>
> [paths]
> default = git+ssh://git@github.com/yourusername/netbeans.git
> upstream = git+ssh://git@github.com/apache/netbeans.git
>
> And then you can pull from either:
>
> $ hg pull           # or `hg pull default` -- pulls from your fork on GitHub
> $ hg pull upstream  # pull from the canonical repo
>
> When the NetBeans instructions tell you to create a Git _branch_, you'll want to create a Mercurial _bookmark_. You can then do your work and commit, then push that bookmark to your fork and open a pull request. In other words:
>
> $ hg pull upstream
> $ hg update master
> $ hg bookmark mybranch    # equiv. to `git checkout -b mybranch`
> ...make your changes...
> $ hg commit -m '[NETBEANS-XXXX]'
> $ hg push -r mybranch     # equiv. to `git push [-u] origin mybranch`
>
> Note that hg-git currently has some warts around rewriting history locally -- there are workarounds but it's not a smooth experience. As long as you don't rewrite (i.e. rebase, amend, histedit, etc.) any changes you've already pushed, you'll be okay.
>
>> I'm considering using git to clone my github fork to local, then point my current hggit clone to the local github clone. The idea is that I might want to do stuff (NB docs) locally before pushing to github. Is this needed and/or a good idea?
> Nah, as I've described above you can pretty well eliminate the extra local clone -- after all that's what hg-git does internally anyway!
>
>> -ernie
>>
>> PS. I recall years ago seeing somewhere about running git and hg commands both in the same clone, but that seems fraught with danger.
> Yeah, I'd recommend against trying that.
>
> pacem in terris / мир / शान्ति / ‎‫سَلاَم‬ / 平和
> Kevin R. Bullock
>
>
>