GitHub Pull Requests

GitHub pull requests for Users and Proxied Maintainers (please shorten this)


The most efficient way of submitting your contributions is through pull requests on our GitHub repository. At the moment, it gives the best response time, the widest audience for reviews and some nice scripting (including CI) to help.

Once the pull request is created, our tooling will automatically CC the relevant people (maintainers and/or proxy-maint team) and perform basic QA checks via pkgcheck. If any issues are reported, please fix them or explicitly ask for help. Our reviewers may skip pull requests which are marked as not passing CI.

Afterwards, follow the suggestions given by reviewers and push updates until the pull request is fully approved. If you do not receive a reply within a reasonable time, please make sure to ping us on the pull request. When it's ready and approved, we'll merge it.

Please keep the same commit structure as you would use when committing straight to Gentoo as a developer, and follow the best git practices (atomic changes, proper commit messages). For smaller changes, we can squash and reword the commits for you. However, if you are going to actively maintain multiple packages or submit larger changes, we will require you to squash, split and word your commits appropriately. Please see the git documentation on rewriting history. Once you've got updated commit set, use  to overwrite your previous commits on the pull request branch.

Step 0: User configures the local repository
Clone the github mirror of the Gentoo repository under the remote name "upstream".

Fork the Gentoo repository on GitHub and then add it under the remote name "github" to your local repository.

Step 1: User updates the local repository
Say you are making changes to package app-foo/bar. Create a local branch with your changes:

Make your changes and make sure to run repoman to check for basic errors:

Then commit your changes (if you're closing some bugs on Bugzilla, you can mention them here as suggested by GLEP66):

Step 2: User makes a pull request
Now that you've made your changes and updated your local branch, it's time to send it off to GitHub and make a PR (Pull Request) to the Gentoo Developers.

Start by pushing the branch with your changes to your GitHub repository:

Then create a pull request from your GitHub repository's local branch to the Gentoo repository's master branch. When your changes have been merged, you may delete your local repository's branch with: