Some projects on gitorious want all patches via git merge requests. This is very tedious, particularly for small changes. It’s therefore likely that many small improvements will never be submitted. Projects must care about that if they care about quality.

As far as I can tell, you must do it like this:

Create a remote clone

You can do that via the project’s top level web page. For instance. Then you need to “checkout” that clone on the command line.

Or reuse an existing clone, though you’ll have to rebase against the original, probably fixing some awkward conflicts from previous commits to your clone if you haven’t used branches for everything as I suggest below. It looks like people often create new clones for each merge request.

Create a branch in your remote clone

For instance:

• git branch mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo master
• git checkout mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo
• Make your changes, add and commit them.
• git push origin mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo

Request a Merge

Click the “Request Merge” button at the right, when looking at your clone’s top-level. For instance. There is no “Merge Request” button when looking at an individual commit, or even when looking at a branch. This would make it far easier to submit small changes.

Then you must copy/paste the first-line and details from your commit message into the two text fields on the Request Merge form.

You must also choose your branch name from a drop-down list and choose the commit from that branch that you want to use.

Then you can finally click “Create Merge Request”.