Forking Tips

When forking projects for the course, follow these tips to avoid potential issues with your submissions!

Academic Integrity

First, I want to emphasize that you must protect your work from other students in the course. When you first fork, your code will be accessible to all students in the course. If you commit code in this state, it will be treated as an academic integrity violation, since you are exposing your work to other students.

Accordingly, the first thing you should do after forking a project is to go to Settings > Collaborators and teams, then remove the CSC430 team from the list.

You should make sure that I am still on the access list, though, to ensure that I will have access.

My github user name is pwright4.

(Almost) No Pull Requests!

For the very first “hello world” project, you are instructed to make changes to a repository and then create a pull request to merge your changes into the main branch.

For all other projects, you should not be creating pull requests. You will be creating your own forks and updating them, but will never be merging your code back into the main branch.

If you want to use pull request on your own fork, you are definitely free to do so, but it is really over-complicating the work!

Do Not Change The Fork Name

When you click the fork button on a project, it will create a new repository under your name and, by default, the new repository will have the same name as the original repository.

For example, if we have a course project at

MSUCSIS/csc430-setup-project

then the suggested, default name for a fork created by a user pwright4 would be

pwright4/csc430-setup-project

Do not change the default, suggested name!

When grading, I will be iterating through all user names for the team and attempting to clone

[some--user-name]/csc430-setup-project

If you change the name of the fork, I will not find your project and you will not receive a grade.

Make Sure You Fork

Do not create a new repository from scratch and copy the contents from the original repository. Do not create your repository in any way other than forking the original repository.

Use Git To Work With Your Fork

Do not download the code as a zip file and attempt to import it into your IDE. You should use git clone and the other git commands discussed in the course to “download” and “upload” your code from/to GitHub.

Consequences

If you do not follow these instructions and your project ends up not being graded, you will simply receive a zero. The ability to follow instructions and work precisely is critical for success in this industry, so it’s time to develop that ability if you have gotten to this point in your education without it!