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Developing in GitHub

This document describes the development steps related to handling the git repository.

If you are new to GitHub, there's a nice quickstart guide on GitHub explaining the basics.

Initial setup

You need to perform this set up at least once if you haven't use GitHub before. Read through the quickstart guide Set up Git page to get your git up and running. You will need to Fork a repository next. After that "Life of a Pull Request" describes the common everyday workflows.

Configure your SSH access

The easiest way to configure access to your GitHub repository is to use SSH keys. For that you need an SSH private and public key, ideally a strong one. You can use different keys for different sites if you want. In this example, we will create one for using in GitHub only.

Create the ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github file executing the following. (Here and elsewhere, {{X}} are placeholders for your email/username)

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "{{EMAIL}}" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github

Go to your SSH and GPG keys settings and paste the contents of your public key (the one ending in .pub), that would be the output of this command:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github.pub

To use a specific key when SSHing to the github.com domain, you can add this snippet of config to your .ssh/config file executing the following.

cat >> ~/.ssh/config <<EOF

Host github.com
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github
  IdentitiesOnly yes
EOF

The IdentitiesOnly yes part forces to only use the provided IdentityFile when talking to GitHub.

Fork your private copy

The JPEG XL code is located in this repo.

The normal developer workflow in GitHub involves creating your own fork of a repository and uploading your own changes there. From your own copy you can request merges to the upstream repository directly, there's no need to create a branch in the upstream repository.

Fork the repository in GitHub to create your own copy of the repository in GitHub. You can then propose to include changes in the main repository via a Pull Request.

Once you are done you should have your repository at

https://github.com/{{USERNAME}}/libjxl

where {{USERNAME}} denotes your GitHub username.

Checkout the JPEG XL code from GitHub

To get the source code on your computer you need to "clone" it. There are two repositories at play here, the upstream repository (libjxl/lbjxl) and your fork ({{USERNAME}}/libjxl). You will be normally fetching new changes from the upstream repository and push changes to your fork. Getting your changes from your fork to the upstream repository is done through the Web interface, via Pull Requests.

The Fork a repo goes in great detail, but uses the git remote names upstream for the shared upstream repository and origin for your work. This guide proposes an alternative naming scheme, used in the examples below.

In this guide origin is the upstream shared repository and myfork is your fork. You can use any other name for your fork if you want. Use the following commands to set things up, replacing {{USERNAME}} with your GitHub username:

git clone https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl --recursive
cd libjxl
git remote set-url --push origin git@github.com:{{USERNAME}}/libjxl.git
git remote add myfork git@github.com:{{USERNAME}}/libjxl.git
git remote -vv

These commands did three things:

  • Created the repository with origin as the upstream remote,
  • Changed the "push" URL to point to your fork, and
  • Create a new remote pointing to your fork.

The last step is optional. Since the "fetch" URL of origin points to the shared repository and the "push" URL points to your fork, fetching from origin always gets the latest changes from the upstream repository regardless of the contents of your fork.

Having a second origin called myfork is only useful if you need to download pending changes from your fork from a different computer. For example, if you work on multiple computers, each one with this setup, you can push to your fork from one, and then fetch from myfork from another computer to get those.

Life of a Pull Request

The general GitHub flow guide applies to sending Pull Requests to this project.

All the commands here assume you are in a git checkout as setup here.

Sync to the latest version

git fetch origin

The last upstream version is now on origin/main and none of your local branches have been modified by this command.

Start a new branch

To start a new change you need a local branch. Each branch will represent a list of individual commits which can then be requested to be merged as a single merge request. So in general one branch is one code review, but each branch can have multiple individual commits in it.

git checkout origin/main -b mybranch

This will create a new branch mybranch tracking origin/main. A branch can track any remove or local branch, which is used by some tools. Running git branch -vv will show all the branches you have have, what are they tracking and how many commits are ahead or behind. If you create a branch without tracking any other, you can add or change the tracking branch of the current branch running git branch --set-upstream-to=....

Add changes to your branch

Follow any of the many online tutorials, for example The basics chapter from the https://git-scm.com/doc website is a good starting guide. Create, change or delete files and do a git commit with a message.

The commit message is required. A commit message should follow the 50/72 rule:

  • First line is 50 characters or less.
  • Then a blank line.
  • Remaining text should be wrapped at 72 characters.

The first line should identify your commit, since that's what most tools will show to the user. First lines like "Some fixes" are not useful. Explain what the commit contains and why.

We follow the Google C++ Coding Style. A clang-format configuration file is available to automatically format your code, you can invoke it with the ./ci.sh lint helper tool.

Read the CONTRIBUTING.md file for more information about contributing to libjxl.

Upload your changes for review

The first step is a local review of your changes to see what will you be sending for review. gitg is a nice Gtk UI for reviewing your local changes, or tig for similar ncurses console-based interface. Otherwise, from the terminal you can run:

git branch -vv

To show the current status of your local branches. In particular, since your branch is tracking origin/main (as seen in the output) git will tell you that you are one commit ahead of the tracking branch.

* mybranch       e74ae1a [origin/main: ahead 1] Improved decoding speed by 40%

It is a good idea before uploading to sync again with upstream (git fetch origin) and then run git branch -vv to check whether there are new changes upstream. If that is the case, you will see a "behind" flag in the output:

* mybranch       e74ae1a [origin/main: ahead 1, behind 2] Improved decoding speed by 40%

To sync your changes on top of the latest changes in upstream you need to rebase:

git rebase

This will by default rebase your current branch changes on top of the tracking branch. In this case, this will try to apply the current commit on top of the latest origin/main (which has 2 more commits than the ones we have in our branch) and your branch will now include that. There could be conflicts that you have to deal with. A shortcut to do both fetch and rebase is to run git pull -r, where the -r stands for "rebase" and will rebase the local commits on top of the remote ones.

Before uploading a patch, make sure your patch conforms to the contributing guidelines and it builds and passes tests.

Once you are ready to send your branch for review, upload it to your fork:

git push origin mybranch

This will push your local branch "mybranch" to a remote in your fork called "mybranch". The name can be anything, but keep in mind that it is public. A link to the URL to create a pull request will be displayed.

Enumerating objects: 627, done.
Counting objects: 100% (627/627), done.
Delta compression using up to 56 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (388/388), done.
Writing objects: 100% (389/389), 10.71 MiB | 8.34 MiB/s, done.
Total 389 (delta 236), reused 0 (delta 0)
emote:
remote: Create a pull request for 'mybranch' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/{{USERNAME}}/libjxl/pull/new/mybranch
remote:
To github.com:{{USERNAME}}/libjxl.git
 * [new branch]      mybranch -> mybranch

Updating submodules

The repository uses submodules for external library dependencies in third_party. Each submodule points to a particular external commit of the external repository by the hash code of that external commit. Just like regular source code files, this hash code is part of the current branch and jpeg xl commit you have checked out.

When changing branches or when doing git rebase, git will unfortunately not automatically set those hashes to the ones of the branch or jpeg xl commit you changed to nor set the source files of the third_party submodules to the new state. That is, even though git will have updated the jpeg xl source code files on your disk to the new ones, it will leave the submodule hashes and the files in third_party in your workspace to the ones they were before you changed branches. This will show up in a git diff because this is seen as a change compared to the branch you switched to. The git diff shows the difference in hash codes (as if you are changing to the old ones), it does not show changes in files inside the third_party directory.

This mismatch can cause at least two problems:

*) the jpeg xl codebase may not compile due to third_party library version mismatch if e.g. API changed or a submodule was added/removed.

*) when using commit -a your commit, which may be a technical change unrelated to submodule changes, will unintentionally contain a change to the submodules hash code, which is undesired unless you actually want to change the version of third_party libraries.

To resolve this, the submodules must be updated manually with the following command after those actions (at least when the submodules changed):

git submodule update --init --recursive

Here, the init flag ensures new modules get added when encessary and the recursive flag is required for the submodules depending on other submodules.

If you checkout a different branch, you can spot that submodules changed when it shows a message similar to this:

M       third_party/brotli
M       third_party/lcms

If you do a rebase you may end up in a harder to solve situation, where git submodule update --init --recursive itself fails with errors such as:

Unable to checkout '35ef5c554d888bef217d449346067de05e269b30' in submodule path 'third_party/brotli'

In that case, you can use the force flag:

git submodule update --init --recursive --force

Iterating changes in your pull request

To address reviewer changes you need to amend the local changes in your branch first. Make the changes you need in your commit locally by running git commit --amend file1 file2 file3 ... or git commit --amend -a to amend all the changes from all the staged files.

Once you have the new version of the "mybranch" branch to re-upload, you need to force push it to the same branch in your fork. Since you are pushing a different version of the same commit (as opposed to another commit on top of the existing ones), you need to force the operation to replace the old version.

git push origin mybranch --force

The pull request should now be updated with the new changes.

Merging your changes

We use "rebase" as a merge policy, which means that there a no "merge" commits (commits with more than one parent) but instead only a linear history of changes.

It is possible that other changes where added to the main branch since the last time you rebased your changes. These changes could create a conflict with your Pull Request, if so you need to git fetch, git rebase and push again your changes which need to go through the continuous integration workflow again to verify that all the tests pass again after including the latest changes.

Trying locally a pending Pull Request

If you want to review in your computer a pending pull request proposed by another user you can fetch the pull request commit with the following command, replacing NNNN with the pull request number:

git fetch origin refs/pull/NNNN/head
git checkout FETCH_HEAD

The first command will add to your local git repository the remote commit for the pending pull request and store a temporary reference called FETCH_HEAD. The second command then checks out that reference. From this point you can review the files in your computer, create a local branch for this FETCH_HEAD or build on top of it.