Working with git branches in Visual Studio

[John Hartman]

I have been building OBS with Visual Studio for a couple weeks now (thanks to the detailed instructions), and have made a number of changes for which I would eventually like to submit pull requests.

I am new to git - my version control experience has been with Subversion (and SourceSafe back in the day). As I understand it, I need to create a branch on my copy of the OBS repository for each of my changes, and eventually create pull requests for those branches.

But how do those branches (or their local copies) work with building in Visual Studio?
Do I need to run cmake-gui to generate project files for each branch, and for my local "all my stuff" version? Or is there a simpler/faster method?

 

[Lain]

CMake will usually automatically regenerate when you build when it detects changes to any of the CMake files. So it should automatically regenerate without any extra needed steps even if you're just compiling the project from visual studio. It uses a pre-build script that it attaches to the project files to accomplish that.

In order to make a pull request, what you usually want to do is fork the project on github, then create a branch on your fork. Then, you can submit it as a pull request when navigating to the branch via github. After, if you want to update or change your pull request, you can just continue to upload to the fork, because a pull request is just a reference to a branch.

Hope I'm making sense.

 

[John Hartman]

Thanks Jim.

My brain was stuck in old-style version control where keeping of multiple buildable open branches would have meant making copies of the project. I did what I should have done a week ago and played around with octocat's Spoon-Knife demo project on github - small enough to blow away and start over when I mangled things.

Since git keeps track of the branching mechanics, life is good, and a helluva lot easier.