Upgrade StorageAttempting to submit new style through GitHub
I have edited a citation style to create a new one for the journal "Fine Focus". I have successfully figured out how to edit it and am happy with the file. However, I have been trying on and off for a week now to submit the style through GitHub. I have been attempting to follow instructions on this website: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md I really don't know how to do this and it isn't intuitive even after reading and trying this. I am very frustrated. I can't figure out what "pull requests" and "merge commits" are. GitHub help has been no help at all. This is not something I will probably never need to do again. I have already wasted so much time on this. I just want to submit the style so other people can use it. Can someone who knows what they are doing help me or submit it for me? Any help would be appreciated. I can send the code.
3a. Submitting a new style
If you're submitting a new style, see the instructions on Creating new files. In short, the steps involve:
Visit https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles and click the plus icon (with a "Fork this project and create a new file" tooltip). When submitting a dependent style, first navigate to the dependent subdirectory.
Write the file name of the style in the "Name your file..." text field. Make sure to add a ".csl" extension, e.g. "journal-of-results.csl".
Paste the style code into the code editor window.
Click the "Propose new file" button.
In the next window, describe the changes you've made. When finished, click the "Send pull request" button.
This doesn't require you to understand anything about pull requests or merge commits. Which steps here are unclear?
Sorry to hear you got stuck for a while. Looking at your past GitHub activity (https://github.com/jenniferhuddleston?tab=activity), it looks like you created several pull requests entirely *within* your own copy of the CSL style repository in your failed attempts. We don't get alerts in that case, so you weren't on our radar before.
Apologies for the complicated instructions (which I agree can be a bit daunting for newcomers to GitHub), but they save us a lot of time. With hundreds of people contributing styles, and only two or three volunteers maintaining the repository, we can only keep up if contributors create pull requests. Accepting styles via email or other means just produces too much work for us. We also heavily subscribe to the teach-a-man-to-fish philosophy, and hope that teaching contributors our preferred workflow saves us time in the long run. Being familiar with how GitHub works is a useful skill to have, since it's an extremely popular site in the world of software development.
In short, the way contributing to the CSL repository works is that you create a copy of our repository (a fork), add your new style to your copy (via a commit to your repository), and then create a pull request asking us to accept the changes you made in your copy of the repository into the official repository. Following our "Contributing" instructions streamlines this process a bit, but that's basically how it works behind the scenes.
Do you have any thoughts what we could do to make things easier? Did you have trouble finding https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md? I've been thinking maybe we should create a YouTube video that shows the whole process, but you might have other ideas.