Contributing to WebKit using GitHub (Proposal) ¶

Sometimes when folks are developing an experimental feature, they feel stressed by WebKit's current code review system because breaking their feature down into many small patches that land over a period of weeks makes it harder for them to iterate on the feature. This document describes an alternative process for contributing to WebKit that uses a more git-like approach based on GitHub's tools. This process is somewhat experimental, but it might work well for folks who are familiar with git-style development and are working on largely self-contained features.

Because this process is experimental, you'll probably want to line up a reviewer for you changes ahead of time to make sure they're interested in using this process.

Setup ¶

1. Create a GitHub account (if you don't already have one)
2. Fork ​https://github.com/WebKit/webkit
3. $ git clone git@github.com:yourname/webkit.git

Writing code ¶

1. $ git checkout master -b awesomefeature
2. Write some awesome code.
3. Commit locally and push to origin (your GitHub account) as you normally would with git

Tracking upstream ¶

1. One-time setup: $ git remote add upstream git://github.com/WebKit/webkit.git
2. $ git fetch upstream
3. $ git merge upstream/master
4. $ git push origin master

If you never modify your local master branch, merging upstream/master will always be a fast-forward merge (i.e., no merge conflicts). You can then merge these new commits into your in-flight feature branches as you normally would with git.

Getting your code reviewed ¶

1. Find a reviewer who is interested in reviewing your awesome feature.
2. Push your lastest commits to your feature branch (e.g., $ git push origin awesomefeature)
3. Create a pull request by going to ​https://github.com/yourname/webkit/pull/new/awesomefeature
4. Click the "Change Commits" button to select that reviewer's WebKit repo as the "base branch". TODO: Investigate whether we can make reviewers members of the "WebKit" organization so you can just use WebKit/webkit@master as the base branch.
5. Write a helpful description of your pull request and click "Send pull request".
6. Iterate with the reviewer as usual using GitHub's review tools.

Landing a patch ¶

TODO: If we're going to use this process, we'll probably want to teach webkit-patch how to automatically fill in the ChangeLog description and "Reviewed by" lines from the pull request.

1. If you're landing a patch for someone else, first download and apply the patch: $ curl https://github.com/yourname/webkit/pull/7.patch | git am
2. $ ./Tools/Scripts/webkit-patch upload --no-review (Note: This will upload the current branch as one patch to a newly created bugs on ​https://bugs.webkit.org/.)
3. Fill in the ChangeLog description from the pull request, and fill out the "Reviewed by" line based on who reviewed your patch. (Please include a link to the pull request in case folks want to read the discussion.)
4. Go to the ​https://bugs.webkit.org/ bug for your patch and set the commit-queue+ flag. (If you're not a committer, you'll need to ask a committer to set that flag for you.)