Developer's Guide
Prerequisities
The following assumes you are able to build OpenCPN from source and have the needed tools. You can find the detailed instructions at http://opencpn.org/compiling_source_linux and http://opencpn.org/compiling_source_windowsGit magic
If you followed the building instructions above, you already have the local repository clone and all the needed tools on your computer. Open a terminal (run cmd.exe) and change to the directory where you have cloned the source.Personal advice: to save a lot of problems later, don't be afraid to use a lot of small per-task branches. Could sound weird especially to the guys used to the traditional version control systems, but this is how it's meant to be with git and modern distributed version control systems. And believe me that merging branches is much easier than cherry-picking commits belonging to a single task.
Following are a few git commands you will for sure need sooner or later:
To update to the latest upstream code
git pull origin
To see all the branches in your local repository
git branch
To create a new branch
git branch [NAME]
To change to another branch (don't forget to commit or reset your changes before changing to another branch, otherwise git will not be happy throwing away your work and overwriting it with other branch)
git checkout [NAME]
To delete a branch
git branch -D [NAME]
To add a file to the current branch
git add [filename.ext]
To delete a file from the current branch
git rm [filename.ext]
To commit your local changes to the current branch
git commit -a -m "My commit message text"
To throw away the latest code changes you've done and get back to the last commited state
git reset --hard
Be aware that this is not a Git tutorial at all. To know how to use Git, consult the Git book at http://book.git-scm.com/ or any other tutorials on the net.
Code formatting
Switch your code editor to Expand Tabs(6)- In Visual Studio 2008 it's Tools -> Options... ->Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Tabs - Fill in 2 sixes and switch the radiobutton to Insert spaces
- Others - TBD
OPTIONAL: Publishing your code
GitHub is the way to go. Unlike Sourceforge where git is just one of the storage backends, it's based on the ideas behind distributed version control from the very begining. And the graphs are so nice...Instructions TBD
Creating a patch
Expecting your branch is checked out and you are in your working directory. Simply issue:git diff master > mystuff.patch
In the newly created file called mystuff.patch you may review the code you are going to submit with any text editor.
Submitting a patch
Create a Flyspray account at http://opencpn.org/flyspray/