Hi John,
Yes, that is what you are doing here. The workflow for this is that if you run:
git clone https://github.com/pkp/ojs.git
You get a copy of the entire OJS repo on your web server. THEN if you run:
git checkout stable-3_3_0
You will see the following message:
Branch ‘stable-3_3_0’ set up to track remote branch ‘stable-3_3_0’ from ‘origin’ by rebasing.
Switched to a new branch ‘stable-3_3_0’
Which tells you that you’ve now got a stable-3_3_0 branch on your webserver that is tracking the official PKP OJS repo on github. If the dev team ever add commits to that official repo, you can pull them into your local copy on your webserver by running:
git fetch origin (origin, in this case, meaning https://github.com/pkp/ojs.git)
and then if you run:
git status
you’ll maybe see something like:
Your branch is behind ‘origin/stable-3_3_0’ by 10 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
Essentially what this tells you is that there are now ten new commits to the official github repo, and because you originally cloned that repo, you can just run a command like git pull to pull those commits down into your repository.
The important thing to remember there is that running “git fetch” does not immediately put the origin commits into your own copy. It just stashes them off to the side. Only when you run “git pull” (or in some cases git rebase, if you’re doing your own dev work) do they actually go in.
If this all sounds like generally too much work I suppose it’s worth asking at this point why you want to build your OJS installation via git. Are you looking for a way to upgrade easily in the future?
Cheers,
Jason