Want to update a style on GitHub, but GitHub just silently errors
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.
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.
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?
I think Rintze had an idea of what was going on, so he may be able to help out here.
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?
I assume you've tried clearing your browser cache?
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.
(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 )
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.
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.