[ImageJ-devel] [Postcards] Bring Postcards up-to-speed (#1)

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Chris,

On Fri, 5 Jul 2013, Chris wrote:

> > First, please make sure that you cloned your project "Postcards" with
> > GitHub for Mac. If you did not, or if you are not sure, just re-clone
> > it.
> 
> This is the key to my inability to proceed.  Reading about git terms and
> their meaning is certainly sound advice which I am following, but it
> would help me greatly if I could get past this step of cloning to my
> Mac.  This is the github help for cloning:

I see that you are still on the GitHub page that talks about forking.

"To fork" means that you start with somebody else's repository, make your
own repository from that. That's clearly not what you did, otherwise your
Postcards repository wouuld not have contained just an initial commit with
only a .gitignore and a README.md.

So it is not very surprising that the documentation does not match
*exactly* what you are seeing: you followed the wrong page... :-)

By the way, this comes back to my suggestion to acquaint yourself with Git
terms: if you had understood what a "fork" is, you would probably have
looked at other documentation to begin with.

> As I mentioned, there is no "Clone in Mac" button.  My Git for Mac screen differs from your screen shot:
> 
> The GITHUB.COM with its list of repositories in the left column is not there,

And this is right where you should have stopped and tried again, reading
my mail more carefully.

I stated that I had to put in my GitHub credentials. If you take a step
back and think about it: GitHub for Mac *cannot* know who you are on
GitHub. It *requires* those credentials to connect you to your remote
(GitHub is remote, as far as your computer is concerned) repositories.

Probably you just clicked "connect me later" when GitHub for Mac started
the first time and readily forgot about it. Probably you "just want to get
it done and move on". Probably you wanted to save time by ignoring that
GitHub login screen. However, as you probably realized by now, that desire
to save time cost your more time, multiple times over, than if you would
have spent a single afternoon to get acquainted with Git, get acquainted
with GitHub, follow that HelloWorld tutorial *without* trying to
substitute "Postcards" for "HelloWorld" in the places you thought might be
appropriate, until the point when you understood the workings and
intentions of Git to the point that you *knew* when to substitute, and
when not to.

> and there is no list with "Clone to Computer" buttons on the right.  I'm
> sure there is a simple explanation for these differences, and I would
> love to know what it is.  :-)

Well, as I suggested, if you do not understand differences, do not go on.
Repeat. Remember: if you try to build a tower, and that foundation did not
quite work out, it is unwise to simply go on and build story after story.
Likewise, if you follow a tutorial and some step does not quite work as
you thought it should, it is unwise to simply ignore it and go on with the
tutorial. The tower will topple over.

> On the site mac.github.com it says:
> 
> Clone repositories in one click
> When you add repositories to GitHub for Mac, we automatically match them
> up with any organizations you belong to.

Exactly. But for that, you need to provide it with your GitHub
credentials. Otherwise it cannot know who you are.

> Want to pull down a repository from GitHub.com? Check out the  button on
> the website.
> 
> Clicking that button gets me right back to the mac.github.com page.  

Yep. As I mentioned a couple of times now, it is more important to
understand the meaning behind the instructions than to match up visually
what the buttons look like.

So they changed the GitHub web interface. Big deal, you can work around
that. Especially with all the help you received from now four people.

So again, I would like to encourage you to pay less attention to the exact
labels of the exact buttons on the exact web page, and instead pay more
attention what the idea behind those steps in those tutorials are. Again,
I would like to encourage you to stop in your tracks when you do not
understand why something went wrong when it it, and figure out why,
possibly by repeating the process and trying to figure out the tutorial's
intention more thoroughly, until you manage to get it right.

For example, the GitHub application makes it dirt easy to interoperate
with GitHub. But you have to give it a chance, of course! If you want to
interoperate with *your* repositories, *of course* the application needs
to know who you are on GitHub. And if it does not show you those
repositories (or in your case, this repository), then it probably just
does not know who you are. And since GitHub for Mac is a well-written
application, you should be able to sift through the menus and figure out
which one connects you to GitHub.

Ciao,
Johannes