A Project Evaluation Activity

Summary

This repository contains a template to be used for evaluating FOSS projects. The template is named evaluation_template.md, and contains a questionnaire to be completed for each project that you evaluate.

For each project that you evaluate, you will copy the template and name the copy with the name of the project followed by _evaluation_NUM.md where NUM indicates the evaluation number (since there may be more than one evaluation of the same project completed by different persons and/or teams).
For example if you evaluate a project named Go (and there is no evaluation of Go yet) and a project named sketchy (and there are already two evaluations for that project), you would copy the template into two files named Go_evaluation_1.md and sketchy_evaluation_3.md respectively.

To do any evaluation at all, you will fork and clone this repository, and create a new branch named with the project you will evaluate. Details are below.

Detailed Steps

1. You will be given a project to evaluate as the first step. In these instructions we will assume the name of the project is fuzzball.

2. You might be working individually or as part of a team, depending on whether this is an in-class or a homework exercise. These instructions will call you a team, even if you are a team of size one.

3. One member of the team begins by forking this repository to their own GitHub account, and cloning the fork to their local machine. Only one person should do this. That person will act as the editor of the file.

4. Once the repository is cloned to the local machine, you should create an upstream remote that points to this original repository:

    git remote add upstream https://github.com/nyu-ossd-s20/project-evaluation.git
   

5. Then you should create a new branch named fuzzball (or whatever your project's name is), do all work in that new branch. To create the branch and check it out simultaneously using Git, use the command

     git checkout -b fuzzball
   

6. Having done this, the next step is to copy the file named evaluation_template.md to a file named fuzzball_evaluation.md.

7. At this point the file should be put under Git's control:

   git add fuzzball_evaluation.md
   git commit -m "Created copy of template into fuzzball_evaluation.md"
   

   (Make sure that the comment above is appropriate for your project. It should not talk about fuzzball. )

8. If more than one person is in the team, the team should work on answering the questions as the team (otherwise the team members do not get a full picture of the project). Answer all the questions in the template based on the information on the project website, in OpenHub.com if needed, and in the project repository (DO NOT use a search engine!!!).

9. You might want to update the file periodically in Git so that you do not lose work and can back up to a previous edit if you need to. Just stage and commit as you go along.

10. When the evaluation is complete, stage it one last time and commit it.

11. [OPTIONAL] Since you are not working in the master branch you do not have to synchronize with the upstream, but if you want to do so anyway, you would pull its most recent version of the master branch into your repository:

    git checkout master
    git pull upstream master
    

    If you do that, you can get back to the fuzzball branch by running

    git checkout fuzzball
    

12. Now you need to push your fuzzball branch to your fork:

    git push origin fuzzball
    

13. It is time to issue a Pull Request to the owner of the upstream, yours truly. On GitHub click the Pull Requests tab. Click the green Pull Requests button. The base and head repositories should be correct by default. The base is the original repository, and the head is your fork of it.

    For the compare branch, select your project branch, namely fuzzball. Click the green Create Pull Request button. When the window changes, set a title for the Pull Request: "Submitting Evaluation of Fuzzball" (again make sure to replace the name of the project with your own project) and write some comment in the comments box and then submit.

14. After the Pull Request is accepted and merged, you should synchronize again with the upstream:

    git checkout master
    git pull upstream master
    

15. You should see your evaluation file, fuzzball_evaluation.md in the master branch. If you do not, send a comment. Otherwise you can safely delete your topic branch locally and from the origin (i.e., your fork):

    git branch -d fuzzball
    git push -d origin fuzzball
    

    and synchronize your fork with the upstream:

    git push origin master