How to handle collaborators on an open source project?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨cynber@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨programming@programming.dev⁩

What are some good rules to follow when handling people who want to collaborate on a project that is on your personal repo?

It looks like GitHub doesn’t allow fine control of permissions unless it is an organization repo. I looked around and a lot of other projects (specifically browser extensions) still live on the main dev’s account. I don’t have any reason to doubt the people who want to help, but it might be nice to know what the best practices are.

Should I add everyone as a collaborator? This runs into the issue above where I can’t limit permissions.

Should everyone push contributions from their forks? In that case, how would people work together on a particular feature.

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atheken@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You might have a look at “CONTRIBUTING.md” files in repos.

Set quality standards (no giant PRs, follow documented coding style, include tests for changed functionality, etc).

Establish a way to discuss contributing work before they do it. Generally, have them open an issue discussing the proposed change and get buy-in from the maintainer (you) before starting work.

document any high-level goals and non-goals in the README.md for the repo, and refer to that when discussing changes. You can always amend it as you discover more about what should be built.

Contributors can fork and send a pull request for you to review and merge.

If multiple people want to collaborate on a branch, they can do that in their fork. In my experience, this is pretty rare, usually you don’t want multiple people committing to the same branch (except for merges to master/main/stable, etc).

If you have a few dedicated contributors that have a history of submitting good quality patches, and alignment with you on your project’s goals, you can invite them to have more control in the main repository, at which point there should be minimal concern about granular controls.
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- cynber@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is very helpful, thank you! I’ll look into setting up more of that sometime
  
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MajorHavoc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Should everyone push contributions from their forks?

Yes.

In that case, how would people work together on a particular feature.

They, can grant permissions to eachother (and even to you) to commit directly to their forks.

Since their fork isn’t the main repo, it is easier to reset and try again if things go sideways.

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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  When opening a PR across forms there is an option to allow folks from the target repo to edit the branch. I don’t know exactly what it allows but it should allow committing at least.
  
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  - MajorHavoc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Neat. I’ll check that out! Thanks!
    
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- cynber@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Good to know, I’ll explore some more.
  
  Thank you!
  
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glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Restrict to PR until trust is established.

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- 0xc0ba17@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I mean even with trust, pull requests are objectively the best way to work as a team.
  
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jelloeater85@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Sounds like you need branch protection rules, which you only get on paid plans. Setting up a org is also a good idea anyway if you plan on working as a team of more then 1-2 additional folks.

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- cynber@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Makes sense, thank you!
  
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0x0@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Give CodeBerg a try (they’re on mastodon too), they provide an instance of Forgejo, which is a fork of gitea, which is a fork of gogs.

Or try another git-oriented provider, to see if their features fit your needs, like Gitlab.

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- MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Good advice but not the question asked at all haha
  
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  - 0x0@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    It looks like GitHub doesn’t allow fine control of permissions
    
    Hence my answer.
    
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