Contributing to the IDE

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2018-04-20 10:29, Geoff Canyon via use-livecode wrote:
> Thanks for the clear rationale. I'll take a shot at building the whole
> thing tomorrow.

I should have mentioned in my post (although I think Monte made it 
clear) that docs can be done entirely on GitHub. Doc entries are a 
special case because they:

   1) Are largely independent of everything else

   2) Are mark-down like structure (and so can be previewed easily 
enough)

   3) Are validated by our CI system when you submit the PR.

And Panos noticed that the version on the contributing to docs guide was 
wrong - I'm sure you'll see that change shortly :)

> Two questions:
> 
> 1. Are older versions closed to changes? If I find a bug in LC 8.1.8 
> (or
> some update to it) is it pointless to fix the bug and submit a pull 
> request?

So the rule is that we only maintain (i.e. will only release builds 
from) two branches at any one time.

Right now 9 is in maintenance mode (develop-9.0) and 9.1 is the next 
development version (develop).

Bug fixes should be applied against the current maintenance branch 
(develop-9.0), additions/features and such should be applied agains the 
current development branch (develop).

> 2. Is it fair to submit IDE pull requests the same way I might for the
> documentation? I.E., GitHub was perfectly happy to fork 
> https://github.com/
> livecode/livecode-ide/edit/develop/Toolset/palettes/menubar/revmenubar.
> livecodescript for me, so it seems that if I update it, I could submit 
> a
> pull request for it, without having built anything. Obviously that 
> beheads
> a significant fraction of git's functionality, but it gets the job 
> done,
> correct?

Yes - you can - although I'd be wary of errors creeping in from doing it 
that way (validating lc-docs is easy, validating code changes is very 
very hard).

I guess for very very very minor tweaks you can copy-paste the code 
you've tried into the github text file editor in the appropriate place, 
and submit a PR. However, if those tweaks then need further work, you 
then have to get that revision onto your machine and then re-tweak.

In the long run, though, that approach is only likely to cause things to 
take longer and cause frustration on both sides.

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps