stackFile Contribution Workflow - montegoulding/lcVCS GitHub Wiki

While it would be nice if everyone just adopted lcVCS it's far more likely that the majority of people that might have something to contribute to a project won't. Ideally (at least at first) what we need is as a supplement to the GitHub pull request style contribution with a way that someone can just sent a version of the stackFile.

To handle this idea there is a key in the uVersion property set REF. REF can be a tag, the output of git describe, a short or long commit SHA. Basically anything that can be used as a point to branch from in a git repo.

So here's the workflow:

• When you release a project you set the REF property on each mainstack to the output of git describe.
• A user edits the stackFiles in LiveCode then emails one to you
• You look at the value in REF then use git checkout <the value of REF> -b <branchname>
• You import the stackFiles
• You copy the user's stackFile into the project
• You test and export to have a look at the diffs
• You commit using git commit --author="Name of contributor <email of contributor>" -m "info about the changes"
• You merge the changes where appropriate
• You send the stack back to the contributor with a new REF value from the commit so any further contributions have the correct REF. If you want the contributor to make some more changes you can just leave the branch open.

A number of these steps could be automated. I have automated stamping of lcVCS with the REF property in the DeployRelease command as an example.