Developer Contributions to MDAL

Install all required development packages: GNU make, g++, …

Build:

cd gdal
./configure [options]
make -j8 -s
cd apps; make -s test_ogrsf; cd ..

Run command line utilities (without installing):

. scripts/setdevenv.sh
gdalinfo --version

Run autotest suite:

cd ../autotest
pip install -r requirements.txt
pytest

Git workflows with MDAL

This is not a git tutorial or reference manual by any means. This just collects a few best practice for git usage for MDAL development.

Commit message

Indicate a component name (eg a driver name), a short description and when relevant, a reference to a issue (with ‘fixes #’ if it actually fixes it)

COMPONENT_NAME: fix bla bla (fixes #1234)

Details here...

Initiate your work repository

Fork lutraconsulting/MDAL from GitHub UI, and then

git clone https://github.com/lutraconsulting/gdal
cd gdal
git remote add my_user_name https://github.com/my_user_name/gdal.git

Updating your local master against upstream master

git checkout master
git fetch origin
# Be careful: this will loose all local changes you might have done now
git reset --hard origin/master

Working with a feature branch

git checkout master
(potentially update your local master against upstream, as described above)
git checkout -b my_new_feature_branch

# do work. For example:
git add my_new_file
git add my_modifid_message
git rm old_file
git commit -a

# you may need to resynchronize against master if you need some bugfix
# or new capability that has been added since you created your branch
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master

# At end of your work, make sure history is reasonable by folding non
# significant commits into a consistent set
git rebase -i master (use 'fixup' for example to merge several commits together,
and 'reword' to modify commit messages)

# or alternatively, in case there is a big number of commits and marking
# all them as 'fixup' is tedious
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master
git reset --soft origin/master
git commit -a -m "Put here the synthetic commit message"

# push your branch
git push my_user_name my_new_feature_branch
From GitHub UI, issue a pull request

If the pull request discussion or Travis-CI/AppVeyor checks require changes, commit locally and push. To get a reasonable history, you may need to git rebase -i master, in which case you will have to force-push your branch with git push -f my_user_name my_new_feature_branch

Backporting bugfixes from master to a stable branch

git checkout master
With git log, identify the sha1sum of the commit you want to backport
git checkout 2.2 (if you want to backport to 2.2)
git pull origin 2.2
(git checkout -b branch_name: if you intend to submit the backport as a pull request)
git cherry-pick the_sha1_sum
git push ...

If changes are needed, do them and git commit -a --amend

Things you should NOT do

(For anyone with push rights to github.com/lutraconsulting/gdal) Never modify a commit or the history of anything that has been committed to https://github.com/lutraconsulting/gdal