Developing and Contributing

To develop on a listed repository from your config document you need to clone the repository in an independent development folder and build it locally. This separation helps to have always a reference build available based on the upstream source code and a developer build based on your current modified version.

The coreui-admin script helps you here using the dev command. The dev command allows you to clone and configure a repository inside a dev folder. If your project has support for Qt code-review coreui-admin will install the code-review commit templates and add Gerrit as a remote repository. To mark a repository for code-review add a code-review property in the repository section of your config document with the name of the review path.

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neptune3-ui:
  url: git://code.qt.io/qt-apps/neptune3-ui.git
  branch: '5.13'
  build: qmake
  os: [linux, macos]
  codereview: "qt-apps/neptune3-ui"

You use the dev command like this:

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coreui-admin dev neptune3-ui

This will create a dev/source/neptune3-ui and dev/build/neptune3-ui and after a successful build a dev/install/neptune3-ui. These folders are independent of your upstream tracking folders.

In this workflow, you would edit the code in the dev/source/neptune3-ui folder to contribute to the Neptune3 UI. You can build and then upstream your changes. To check the upstream you would simply update the repo using coreui-admin update and build your upstream version of the repo.

Note

If you like to see what a command is doing, you can simply use the --dry-run option. The command will output a small message on how to configure Qt Creator to build and run your project.