MDT/OCL/Dev/EGit

The Eclipse OCL code is maintained in a GIT repository which is used by Clone Repository. This repository is used in a traditional 'client'/'server' fashion, even though GIT treats all users as peers. The definitive state is on the 'server' at git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/mdt/org.eclipse.ocl.git. Individual committers establish 'client' clones of the 'server' so that for committers, the definitive development stream is at origin/master and each committer's master is a branch of origin/master. A definitive maintenance stream is at for instance origin/R3_1.

The capabilities of EGit are described at EGit/User Guide. The documentation here is complementary, it describes how the committers use EGit to satisfy typical use cases.

Complete Use Cases

Develop a Non-trivial Change

The normal evolution of the project code involves a non-trivial change that may take a few days or weeks to develop, may need review by another committer and may occur concurrently with some other change.

A Bugzilla describes the intended change and supports communication regarding the progress of the change.

The change is developed in a branch whose name starts with bug/nnnnnn where nnnnnn is the Bugzilla number. A short description may follow.

• Discard Old Work to facilitate doing something new
• Create New Branch or Switch to Local Branch or Switch to Remote Branch
• Develop and test changes
• Review Changes prior to commit
• Commit to Branch
• Push to Upstream to create a backup at Eclipse or to publish to other committers
• Create Patch to attach to Bugzilla for review
• Request Review
• Rebase Branch onto origin/master to synchronize with concurrent development
• Review Changes prior to merge
• Merge Branch onto origin/master to commit to the development stream
• Merge Branch onto Another Branch such as a maintenance branch
• Archive Old Branch to prune the EGit displays

Develop a Trivial Change

Very simple changes that do not require review, or must be performed in a hurry may be performed directly on the local master branch.

• Discard Old Work to facilitate doing something new
• Switch to local/master
• Pull from Upstream to synchronize with development stream
• Develop and test changes
• Review Changes prior to commit
• Commit to local/master
• Merge local/master onto origin/master to commit to the development stream

Partial Use Cases

Clone Repository

The Eclipse GIT repositories are accessed using SSH, so you if you want write access, you should first make sure that you have SSH keys. Then you should use the Git Repositories View of the Git Repository Exploring perspective to Create a clone of the existing Git repository accessed at ssh://committer-id@git.eclipse.org/gitroot/mdt/org.eclipse.ocl.git. committer-id is your Eclipse committer name, typically comprising the first letter of your first name followed by your last name.

Creating the clone takes quite some time, perhaps five to ten minutes, not all of which has comforting progress indications. You can use a file explorer to watch the progress. A complete directory tree for each project appears late in the cloning process.

Create New Branch

A new branch should almost always be created as a branch of origin/master, since this gives a simple direct relationship to the development stream. If you use another branch such as local/master you create a branch of a branch and may encounter difficulties in synchronizing changes or exporting the branch to other repositories that may not be aware of all changes in your local/master.

Discard Old Work

EGit is very reluctant to allow you to lose work, so if your current workspace currently contains some experimental changes resulting perhaps from a review or newsgroup query, you must lose these changes before you can proceed.

Changes may be thrown away by Resetting to match some branch, possibly the current one, possibly origin/master, the synchronizing the workspace, and overwriting to lose all changes.

Switch to Remote Branch

If the remote branch is relatively new you may need to Fetch from Upstream to update your list of Remote Tracking branches.

Then select any Git project and Switch to Remote Branch. The decoration on all projects should change to show that the selected branch is in use.

Rebase Branch onto origin/master

In order to merge concurrent changes from for instance origin/master you Rebase onto the origin/master branch. This does not affect the origin/master branch.

You cannot Rebase while your workspace has pending changes, so you must commit, or discard those before rebasing.