Document how to contribute to Eclipse Foundation GitLab repositories

As Eclipse Foundation open source projects, we welcome contributions from anyone (given they're in scope and satisfy some quality requirements etc).

But how can external parties contribute to our projects in the Eclipse Foundation's GitLab? Can they create merge requests, even if they are not a project committer? How would they do that?

I looked around a bit, but could not find any information on this. Is there any documentation of the Eclipse Foundation or of GitLab itself that explains this process?

I'd like to include such information into our documentation, such that interested parties know how to contribute to our project.

This document was created some time ago to help answer some questions related to the migration process. I've somewhat turned it into a cheat sheet, and added some links to docs for Merge Requests.

https://wiki.eclipse.org/Gitlab

Thanks for the information. I looked at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/creating_merge_requests.html. It lists quite a few options to choose from.

It seems I can't create merge requests via the GitLab UI (even if I know the URL) on projects where I don't write access, regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. This negates many of the described options.

There is an email option, but seems complicated. I couldn't quickly find it, so it seems to not be enabled. I'm not sure we should enable it either.

There is an option related to forked repositories. I assume this concerns only forks in the same GitLab instance. Can non-committers create forks of Eclipse project Git repositories within the Eclipse Foundation GitLab instance?

All in all, I still have no idea which option non-committer contributors can/should use...

mentioned in issue eclipse/escet/escet#10 (closed)

I don't think I'm following your workflow. When logged in as a plain user, if I navigate to a file, I see options to fork and create a Merge Request:

If I press Fork, a fork is created in my space, and after my edit, I can create a Merge Request:

eclipse/escet/escet!2 (closed)

For that merge request, I hit the Fork button on the ESCET repository, then in my own fork, used the Web IDE to create a new file, commit it to my repo and submit a MR at the same time. It's quite beautiful.

It seems you're correct.

If I browse all the way to a specific file, and then press the 'Edit' button, I indeed see the message "You're not allowed to edit files in this project directly. Please fork this project, make your changes there, and submit a merge request." and I also see the 'Fork' button. To be honest, I never would have found this, or even known to look here...

Also, on the 'Project overview -> Details' page, there is a 'fork' icon that I can indeed click to create a fork under my account. This is definitely easier to find now that I know what I'm looking for.

However, I was looking before at the 'Repository -> Files' page. This would for me be the most logical place to look for a fork button. But there is no button or anything else on this specific page to suggest I can fork it.

Indeed, there is no Fork option on Repository > Files.

Users who are accustomed to the GitHub Fork & Pull model should feel at home here on GitLab. Otherwise, like anything else, there is a learning curve. Thanks for filing this issue, as it was interesting to go the workflow myself.

closed