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Make a PR to batocera.linux

This page is, currently, far from being perfect. We recommend anyone who wishes to contribute to Batocera to join the Discord server for any questions not covered here.

Batocera is an open-source software, it's source code can be found at https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux. In order to contribute to the code, you can make a pull request with the changes you made to the OS.

Microsoft (the parent company of Github) has a pretty good tutorial for this using Git Bash on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/contribute/get-started-setup-local

There are multiple steps to make a pull request:

  1. Build Batocera and test the modifications, fixing any issues that arise
  2. Make a pull request to batocera.linux containing those commits

We will need to use git for this.

The first time, you will need to fork the system and clone it locally. The next time, you will simply need to make your local copy up to date with the upstream branch.

Github also has a desktop GUI for this, however instructions for this client cannot be provided (yet). If you choose to go down this route, hopefully the GUI is intuitive enough to work out what the equivalent actions on it are.

To make a Pull Request, you first need to make a fork of batocera.linux:

  1. Login to your Github account
  2. Click on the Fork button on the right

A screenshot of a github page, showing the "Watch", "Star" and "Fork" buttons, along with the amount of time they were clicked by others.

This will create a fork at https://github.com/<your Github username>/batocera.linux at your account respectively.

You have to clone this fork locally, the easiest way is to open a command line and type git clone https://github.com/<your Github username>/batocera.linux.

You then need to go into the created folder (which should be batocera.linux), once inside, you will need to tell it this is a fork of https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux using the following commands :

  • git remote add upstream https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux.git
  • git remote set-url upstream https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux.git

Finally, you have to tell it the URL of your own fork itself using :

  • git remote set-url origin https://github.com/YOURNAME/batocera.linux where YOURNAME is your github username.

You then need to make a local branch using git checkout -b Name-of-the-branch , once this is done, you have to commit your changes to it using git commit.

If you're finding differences where you haven't actually made them, make sure your submodules are updated. git submodule update --init.

Once all of this is done, commit them to your branch on your fork using git push --set-upstream origin Name-of-the-branch

You can now go into your Github fork link, and click on Pull Request. This will let you ask to merge the changes into the main repository.

Once you have set this up, you can simply make your own master branch up to date with the upstream master branch. To do this, you need to do:

  1. git checkout master : Tells git to use the master branch
  2. git fetch upstream : Tells git to grab every changes from the upstream repository
  3. git rebase upstream/master : Tells git to make your branch up to date with the master branch of the upstream repository

You then make your changes, create a new branch using git checkout -b Name-of-the-branch and commit your changes to it like before. The rest doesn't change from the first time.

  • contributing-to-batocera.1634514730.txt.gz
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  • by atari