Editing other people’s work

1 Rename your repo

Search the official GitHub documentation at docs.github.com for “rename a repository”.

It should take you here.

Follow the instructions to rename your repo to eitcourse-yourname.

You can also rename it using the gh cli with:

gh repo rename eitcourse-robinlovelace

It will ask you to confirm. Type “y” if you’re sure.

Then, bingo, it will be renamed!

✓ Renamed repository Robinlovelace/eitcourse-robinlovelace
✓ Updated the "origin" remote

1.1 Forking you colleague’s repo

Find the username you have been assigned to in the people_updated.csv file.

Find the repo associated with the colleague. If the username of the person you’re assigned to is called kekeMerz, for example, you can find them with the gh search command as follows, for example:

gh search repos --owner kekeMerz

You should see something like this:

Showing 1 of 1 repositories

NAME                DESCRIPTION  VISIBILITY  UPDATED         
KekeMerz/eitcourse               public      about 1 hour ago
robin@robin-Apollo:~/github/tdscience/course$

Then, fork the repo with:

cd ~/github/
gh repo fork KekeMerz/eitcourse-kekemerze --clone=true

2 Reviewing and commenting on papers

  • Open a comment in the repo you will will be editing

  • First on the the web UI

  • Then, for fun, with the following gh cli command:

gh issue create

3 Making changes and submitting Pull Requests

Open their repo in an editor

Open RStudio and click ‘open project’, navigating to the folder you just cloned, or create new project if there is no .Rproj file.

e.g.

code ~/github/eitcourse-kekemerz
# Or Rstudio
rstudio ~/github/eitcourse-kekemerz/eitcourse.Rproj

Optional: create a new branch with your issue.

This avoids pushing to the main branch, but it’s not essential for this exercise, let’s keep it simple.

and make a minimal change, adding one empty line.

Then, commit and push the change with:

git add .
git commit -m "Great work! I suggest adding a map."
git push

Bonus: make a more substantial change, e.g. adding a sentence, fixing a typo, or (ambitiously) adding a new figure.

Then, commit and push the change with:

git add .
git commit -m "Add a map to the paper."
git push

Then, submit a pull request (PR) with:

gh pr create

If you get an error about the default repo not being set, you can set the default repo with:

gh repo set-default

Then choose the original repo, e.g. KekeMerz/eitcourse-kekemerze.

Then, run the gh pr create command again.

4 Controlled chaos: choose a paper and make some changes!

See https://github.com/tdscience/course/blob/main/data/people_updated.csv to find whose paper you will be commenting on and contributing to.

Reuse