Want to update a style on GitHub, but GitHub just silently errors

terber

Just a day ago I contributed via GitHub a new style ("harvard-durham-university-business-school"), which was kindly accepted within a few minutes (many thanks to AdamSmith!).

I now wanted to improve the style a bit to better match the reference document.

My CSL style document is done, validated and tested. Therefore I tried (as described on https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) to edit (and implicitly fork) the relevant file in GitHub. All seemed well, as I edited the source, added a "commit summary" and an "extended description", and hit "preview". It showed the correct diffs of the old and new source.

But when I click on "Propose File Change" I get to an error 404 page of GitHub. No hint of what went wrong at all.

This is perfectly reproducible, even after I logged off and on at GitHub. This drives me crazy, specifically not knowing WHAT was wrong.

Any suggestions?


Oh, and yes, I'm used to work with code repositories, as I'm a software developer myself, but I'm new to GitHub.

terber

Now I observe some variations in the error messages:

Sometimes I see "404 This is not the web page you are looking for", but now I also got a few times "What?! Your browser did something unexpected. Please contact us if the problem persists.".

Obviously I re-tried everything with a different browser, but no difference between Firefox 20, and latest Internet Explorer on Windows 7.

How can I get my style fixes into the repository?

adamsmith

You're not doing anything wrong - people have reported this 404 on several occasions and it's a github problem, unrelated to the citation-styles-language repository.
I think Rintze had an idea of what was going on, so he may be able to help out here.

Rintze

@terber, you tried using the Edit button at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/harvard-durham-university-business-school.csl ?

terber

I used indeed the "edit" button"on https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/harvard-durham-university-business-school.csl which forwarded me to https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/edit/master/harvard-durham-university-business-school.csl.

But as of now it gets even worse: After clicking the "edit" button no edit window opens, instead the browser only shows "Waiting for a284.e.akamai.net" - and all this while "https://status.github.com/" reports "100% availability". Wow.

I know that's not related to Zotero in any way, but this initial contact with GitHub already rules out that I will ever use it professionally in any way...

So in what way can I contribute to the style?

terber

I wrote to GitHub support (support@github.com) referring to this web site.

dstillman

this initial contact with GitHub already rules out that I will ever use it professionally in any way...

If you were using GitHub professionally, you would use the git command-line client for most things. You can do that regardless of whether there's an issue with the website, and if you're a software developer, that's what I'd recommend to make edits. You still have to use the website to generate a pull request, so if that's broken for you (which sounds like it may be the case here) that's no good, but in general that's just the last step. (And at least your last issue sounds more like a glitch with your nearest Akamai server. The edit button on that file works fine for me. The status page would be reserved for major outages.)

I assume you've tried clearing your browser cache?

Rintze

The GitHub folks already opened an internal issue and were looking into the 404 problem (I pointed them to this thread as well). In the meantime, you can follow option C from https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.

And, just to echo what Dan says: in my experience GitHub has been a very solid product over the past few years, and if you use it intensively you'll certainly want to use either a local command-line or GUI client. The ability to contribute via their website is relatively new, and while it's clear that there are still a few kinks that have to be worked out, they constantly improve on it.

adamsmith

if this isn't fixed within 24hs. you can also upload the style update anywhere else - gist.github.com as a public gist, for example - and we'll do it.

(I'll also 2nd and 3rd what Dan and Rintze say about github. It's been a game changer for us, allowing non-tech users to follow simple instructions for pull requests and for serious users it's stable enough to be used by major players like mozilla https://github.com/mozilla and netflix https://github.com/netflix )

terber

> I assume you've tried clearing your browser cache?
Yes, I did clean the browser cache explicitly for both FF and IE before re-trying. Also restarted browser, finally even re-tested on different Windows machine. The problem remains persistent and reproducible. Having at the moment only Windows machines at hand, I unfortunately can't test it on Linux or MacOSX now.

terber

The problem remained reproducible over last two days, always returning a "404" error message. I tried it around fifteen times during that period.

Finally I created a new GitHub account. Initial attempt with this new account again went into the same error message, but the second attempt was successful.

Thanks to all of you for your support.

Vincent

I have the same problem, both with FF and Chrome. I'll try other option to submit my style...

Vincent

Finally I have created a new GitHub account, as terber done, and it seems to work