Make a PR to batocera.linux

Recommended reading:

• Git has an overview of the broad concepts on their about page.
• Microsoft (the parent company of Github) has a pretty good tutorial for making a pull request (obviously, change Microsoft's documentation Github to Batocera's); this covers most of the same ground that this article does.

Batocera is an open-source software, its source code is hosted at https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux. In order to contribute to the project, you must make a pull request to this online repository (a “remote”). You can achieve this by installing a source control manager (the most obvious one being git), make the changes on your local clone and then make a pull request to Batocera's remote (from here on, we will refer to Batocera's remote as “upstream”).

This article mainly pertains to Linux distributions, but this should also be possible with Git Bash on Windows (with some workarounds, read below).

There are multiple steps to make a pull request:

1. Fork Batocera to your own repository
2. Install git on your machine
3. Clone your fork locally
4. Create a new local branch on your fork
5. Make (and possibly test, if only minor changes) the modifications locally
6. Build Batocera and test the modifications, fixing any issues that arise
7. Push your commits to the new branch
8. Make a pull request to batocera.linux containing those commits

Initial setup involves a few extra steps, but once complete, creating future pull requests are much easier. All you have to do is make sure your local repository is up to date with upstream.

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

1. Login to your Github account
2. Go to https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux
3. Click on the Fork button on the right

This will create a fork at https://github.com/<your Github username>/batocera.linux for your account respectively. From here on, we will refer to this as the “origin” remote.

The most current instructions are available at Git's official documentation.

To surmise:

• On Ubuntu/other Debian-based distros: apt-get install git
• On Fedora: dnf install git
• On Arch: pacman -S git

If you're on another distro you probably already know how to install git.

git will typically be available in the official package repository for your distribution, though depending on some distributions this may be an incredibly old version. You can install a later version by adding a PPA:

• On Ubuntu/other Debian-based distros: add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa and once successfully executed, apt update; apt install git

Other distros generally use more recent versions so this isn't as important.

What account do you want to login to? Github.com
What is your preferred protocol for Git operation? HTTPS
Authenticate Git with your Github credentials? Yes
How would you like to authenticate Github CLI? Login with a web browser

Using git on Windows is generally not recommended, as it is by default not compatible with objects in the file system such as symbolic links, folders with hidden attributes, line terminators in text files, etc. But if you know what you're doing and are willing to workaround these shortcomings, you can utilize Git Bash.

Download and install it. There will be multiple questions during installation, with short explanations of what they mean. Choose what you are most comfortable with. For instance, if you are already using Notepad++ to edit text documents, which saves line terminations correctly (compared to Notepad), then you don't need to worry about CR LF to LF conversion (just select “No conversion”). Once installation is complete, you will have Git Bash added to your Start menu. This will launch MinGW, which you can then use git commands as you normally would in any regular Bash terminal emulator:

One thing that cannot be worked around is symbolic links, Windows doesn't like them. git will, by default, convert symlinks into ordinary files for you. It is recommended to simply not make any changes to any symbolic links in your PRs (you can check which files are symbolic links on the repository).

The rest of this tutorial can be followed as is if using Git Bash.

It is important to distinguish between remote and local repositories. Right now, your account has a remote repository that is a fork (copy) of Batocera.linux. We need to clone (download) this origin remote repository to your local computer to be able to make local edits to it.

The easiest way is to open a command line, navigate to the directory you would like to save the origin repository to and run git clone https://github.com/<your Github username>/batocera.linux.

Once done (this may take a while, depending on your internet speed), run the following:

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

This will config the local repository to be recognized as a fork of upstream (the original remote repository). This makes it easier to stay “in sync” with future changes made to upstream.

The master branch is the “main” branch on which Batocera is built from. If you start making changes directly on your local master branch and make a pull request using that, any additional changes made after the fact will be added to that very pull request, preventing you from making additional changes until that pull request has been merged by upstream. Instead, it is advisable to create a new local branch based on the master branch for each set of changes you want to make per pull request, as that will allow you to make more than one pull request at a time.

To create a new local branch, run git checkout -b name-of-the-branch.

You have some guidelines on this page to compile individual packages, a list of notable files and their location on a live install and this page for more general compilation of the whole Batocera Linux system.

After creating, testing and finalizing your changes, run git commit -a to commit them to the branch. Git will ask you to provide a short description of your changes, this should be no longer than a single sentence. If the changes are more involved and require a deeper description, create the “header” summary on the first line and insert a blank space followed by the longer description.

If additional changes need to be made after the fact, run git commit -a again to add another commit. If many commits have been added to the branch, consider squashing the commits into one.

When all the commits have been committed, merge the commits from your local clone into your fork's repository with the following command (replacing the name of the branch with your own):

git push --set-upstream origin name-of-the-branch

This will “push” your changes into your fork. You can double check that this has occurred by visiting your appropriate branch on your fork at https://github.com/YOURNAME/batocera.linux

Once you've confirmed that you have successfully pushed your changes to your own origin remote, click the Contribute button near the top of the page to submit the pull request to Batocera's main repository.

If you opted to install gh to manage your credentials, it too can be used to create new pull requests instead of the web interface. Run gh pr create and set the base repository to batocera-linux/batocera.linux. Submitting the changes in the browser is recommended as it shows all the accumulated changes on the same page before the actual submission.

After setting this up, the process for making new pull requests becomes much simpler. Just make your own master branch up to date with the upstream master branch before creating a new 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

Then repeat the steps from the "Create a new local branch on your fork" section above.