Chapter 4. Collaboration
In this chapter we’ll start by looking at how to collaborate directly on a single repository—without using forks. We’ll then take some time to look more deeply into collaborating using pull requests, issues, and GitHub pages.
While forks are a good way to accept contributions from people you don’t work with regularly, they are a bit too cumbersome for everyday use in a team that is working together closely. Because of this, you’re probably going to want to collaborate directly on a single repository. However, it’s still important to use branches and pull requests to keep your work separate.
Committing to a Branch
I’ve created a simple single-repo-example under the pragmaticlearning organization, as you can see in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1. The single-repo-example repository
If I want to augment the README.md file, the first thing I need to do is create a branch. That way I’ll be able to keep my changes separate while I’m working on them. To do that, I can just click the “branch:master” button. This creates a drop-down list with the current branches in the project and a text box for entering the name of an existing branch or the new branch that I want to create. You can see this in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2. The branch drop-down list
If I create an update_readme ...