I've been communicating with Sheressa about how we use Git and how Github works in to the phpMyAdmin development workflow. I thought a portion of my email might be helpful to a wider audience.

Sounds like you're a bit confused about the way git and github work -- which is pretty normal when beginning. I'm still not an expert.

In general, any Git repository has the complete commit history, so any time you `git clone` you get a complete independent copy. So in github, when you forked the phpmyadmin repository, github did a git clone of the official phpmyadmin repository (somewhat confusingly called phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git, the first phpmyadmin is the username and the second is the repository name). Within github, then, you had the sheressa/phpmyadmin.git repository (often github leaves off the .git porition when referring to a repository path). So that's your repository/clone/fork of the phpmyadmin -- and at that moment, you have the complete phpMyAdmin source code duplicated in your sheressa github account.

At that point, you would have done a `git clone` of your repository, checking out the sheressa/phpmyadmin.git repository to your local computer. Github's instructions provide a way to continue to get updates from the phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git repository, so you'll continue to get new commits added to your local computer when you update. So technically, there are three different repositories in effect: phpmyadmin on github, sheressa on github, and the local clone. Since this all gets a bit confusing, Git allows you to give nicknames to these sources; on my system (which I believe I configured based on the Github documentation) the phpmyadmin one is 'upstream' and the ibennetch one is 'origin' (so I can `git fetch upstream` and `git push origin`). So basically you'll be making changes locally and pushing them to sheressa/phpmyadmin.git, then from there using the Github interface to submit a pull request to the phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git repository. Hope this makes sense so far.

So far I've just talked about repositories; there's a whole other aspect which is the branches. In phpMyAdmin, development happens on the 'master' branch and we create a branch at each release, so we have for instance MAINT_4_1_3 and QA_4_1. When you do development work, it's generally best to do that in a new branch (which doesn't affect the phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git repository at all and only goes to sheressa/phpmyadmin.git if you push it there). So we do new development in 'master' but since branching is so easy with git, we generally develop something in a temporary branch and then merge it to master from there.

Hope that helps a bit.