Contributing to the SDK

The the release of the SDK, we are excited to have more people contribute to the development of the various software components of CinePI.

How to contribute

Once you have downloaded and installed the SDK, within the home directory you will find a number of folders corresponding to the various software components that comprises of the CinePI camera system.

The 2 we will be highlighting are cinepi-raw and cinepi-gui

The rest of this wiki assumes you have a github account and some basic working knowledge of git. Please refer to online tutorials and guides for learning how to use both.

Process

Most of the software components found within the home directory are linked as git repositories, for example if you look at cinepi-raw:

pi@cinepi:~ $ cd cinepi-raw/
pi@cinepi:~/cinepi-raw $ git status
On branch cinepi-sdk-001
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/cinepi-sdk-001'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean
pi@cinepi:~/cinepi-raw $ git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/cinepi/cinepi-raw.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/cinepi/cinepi-raw.git (push)
pi@cinepi:~/cinepi-raw $ 

This shows use that the cinepi-raw is currently referencing the branch cinepi-sdk-001 and that it is coming from the official cinepi account via the origin url: https://github.com/cinepi/cinepi-raw.git

Let's say you want to start modifying / editing the source within cinepi-raw and you want to maintain / track those changes for either your own purposes or to help contribute to the official main repository as a whole. This is how it can be done:

Forking

First you will want to head to the repository on github via a browser where you are logged into your github account. Find the Fork button near the top-right hand side of the repository under the main menu bar on github.

Once you created your own forked copy of the repository that now exists within your own github account, you will want to change the remote reference so that instead of pointing to the repository from the official cinepi repo, you are going to point to your own, this can be done by on the raspberry pi by performing the following:

Updating reference

cd ~/cinepi-raw
git remote -v
# View current remote URL
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/cinepi-raw.git
# Change the remote URL to your fork
git remote -v
# Verify the remote URL has changed

Now as you make changes to the source, when you commit , push or pull you will be doing so from your personal forked repo.

Sharing your changes with the community

As you perform changes to the source, you can now share them with the community by submitting pull-requests so that your changes may be considered and merged into the official repository.