Contribute to Mercurial in Simple Steps

Mercurial

Mercurial is a distributed source control management tool / system that allow developers around the globe to collaborate source codes. Recently engaged in an ecommerce project that utilize nopCommerce framework, which is an open source project. I found a little bug in there and made my very first contribution in open source. The nopCommerce is hosted on www.codeplex.com

Simple Steps

1. Logon to CodePlex.
2. Create a fork for the project
   
3. Clone the fork
   
4. Make local modifications.
5. Check-in and commit to the local repository.
6. Push changes from local fork to the remote server. In my case, it is https://hg.codeplex.com/forks/swon/austposthandlingchargefix
   
7. After all changes are completed and checked. Create a pull request to merge the fork back to the project.
   

SVN Convention

Disregard the differences of the underlying technology how distributed source repository and non-distributed (classic?) repository works, a fork is basically a branch in SVN. Once you branch off, you can make local modifications that you do not conflict with the trunk (default). When you are done with the fork, you are then required to merge back and is done by the "pull request". In an open source environment, there will be some core developers of the project with higher access that will merge the changes.