04 Sharing and Uploading
Saving changes in your spreadsheet editor, simply stores your changes to the files on your hard-drive. By committing these changes in git, you create a backup of these changes, that can be shared using the GitHub servers. You can make as many commits as you like, ie. you can finish a file in as many sittings as you like, and once you committed these changes you can also start working from one computer and finish from another.
To commit changes simply go back to the GitHub application. Inside the app you will see a message with a summary of the changes to the file since your last commit. If you work to finish an open issue, you can reference the issue by typing:
see #01
This will reference the issue with the number 01 (adjust the number to the issue you are working on). If you have solved an issue with your commit you can type close instead of see.
Sensible commit messages can help you to pick up work more easily where you left off, more importantly they help your collaborators and reviewers to see what it is you change and why you did so. Once you have typed a short commit message into the input box click >>commit changes<<.
Please note the line informing you to which branch your changes will be committed to. This should always be the branch you opened in step 1.
Once you are done with your edits and you wish to make them part of the project. You should open a pull-request. Since all your changes are committed and synced you'll see the following when you go to GitHub in your browser. Simply click on "compare and pull-request"
You have to decide where your changes should be added:
- In the image below I made changes in the demo-wiki branch (from) and wish to include them in the master branch (to).
- You can also see that there are no conflicts.
- Just click on >>Create Pull request<< and wait for a collaborator to pull it in.
There are now two options:
- Either your changes can be merge directly without additions or correction. In this case the branch can safely be deleted. This only occurs on the server, you will have to do this manually on your hard-drive.
- If a collaborator requests further changes to your work, you can simply keep adding commits to the branch from which you opened the pull request. Once these are done your work will get pulled in.