Maintaining a fork of a core package

Originally, each of Atom’s core packages resided in a separate repository. In 2018, in an effort to streamline the development of Atom by reducing overhead, the Atom team consolidated many core Atom packages into the atom/atom repository.

For example, the one-light-ui package was originally maintained in the atom/one-light-ui repository, but was moved to the packages/one-light-ui directory in the main repository.

The Pulsar team has continued this trend and has move even more packages into the core, particularly default language packages. A list of these packages can be found in this document.

Eventually Pulsar’s goal is to have all core packages (the packages that are included in Pulsar by default) migrated directly into the pulsar-edit/pulsar repository. Progress toward this goal can be monitored on this GitHub issue.

If you forked one of the core packages before it was moved into the atom/atom or pulsar-edit/pulsar repository, and you want to continue merging upstream changes into your fork, please follow the steps below.

Step-by-step guide

For the sake of this guide, let’s assume that you forked the pulsar-edit/one-light-ui repository, renamed your fork to one-light-ui-plus, and made some customizations.

Add pulsar-edit/pulsar as a Remote

Navigate to your local clone of your fork:

$ cd path/to/your/fork

Add the pulsar-edit/pulsar repository as a git remote:

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar.git

Get the latest changes for the core package

Fetch the latest changes from the pulsar-edit/pulsar repository:

$ git fetch upstream

Identify recent changes to the core package. For example, if you’re maintaining a fork of the one-light-ui package, then you’ll want to identify recent changes in the packages/one-light-ui directory:

$ git log --oneline upstream/master -- packages/one-light-ui
f884f6de8 [themes] Rename A[a]tom -> P[p]ulsar
0db3190f4 Additional rebranding where needed
234adb874 Remove deprecated code strings
...

Look through the log and identify the commits that you want to merge into your fork.

Merge upstream changes into your fork

For each commit that you want to bring into your fork, use git format-patch in conjunction with git am. For example, to merge commit f884f6de8 into your fork:

$ git format-patch -1 --stdout f884f6de8 | git am -p3

Repeat this step for each commit that you want to merge into your fork.