Okay, I have done a little more investigation, and I think I have a rough idea of one possible way of operating, although I'm not sure it's the ideal method for the long term because it still requires a sort of developer mindset to participate in the project (you have to get TortoiseHg and make your own local repository and go through a number of steps to commit changes). But I think this could work to get a limited number of people started in participating in the project. When we understand SourfeForge and Mercurial a bit better we may be able to implement some PHP scripts to help get more users invovled by making the whole process even easier. Meanwhile, would anybody be interested in helping me document the process of participating in the project at this early stage, especially with respect to getting the permission checked and straightened out?
1. These are some steps I used to commit and merge code:
a. Download TortoiseHg
b. Create a folder for iotaBuildIt
c. Right-click on the folder, open the "TortoiseHg" pop-up menu and select "Clone..."
d. Replace the path in the "source" box with "ssh://xxxxx@hg.code.sf.net/p/iotabuildit/free4all" where xxxxx is your SourceForge user account (you'll need a SourceForge account)
e. This should get you the source code. Now you can run SGDK2 (I assume as SGDK2 forum members you know all about that part) to run and edit the project.
f. When you make an edit you want to share, save the SGDK2 file, and run an HTML5 export
g. When exporting the HTML5, specify the HTML folder where Mercurial code downloaded HTML content, and be sure to check the box and select the option to split the output into as many files as possible.
h. Right-click on the Mercurial root folder and select Hg Commit... (follow the steps, which will commit the changes to your local repository - I don't remember what it looks like)
i. Right-click on the Mercurial root folder and select Hg Workbench
j. Select Synchronize from teh View menu
k. In the lower pane, verify that the path you are uploading to is ssh://hg.code.sf.net/p/iotabuildit/free4all - you may want to insert your_user_name@ before the "hg."
l. Click the button to "push outgoing changesets to remote repository"
m. Navitage to
https://sourceforge.net/p/iotabuildit/free4all/ and click "Request Merge"... follow whatever feels right from there.
n. Keep in mind there are other ways to share your changes in a distributed version control system. This is just if you want to merge your changes back into the base/root image (the parent of the "free4all" fork where anybody can commit changes)
o. You can supposedly also create your own fork
of the "code" repository (not just the free4all repository) in your own user directory. Check if you have permission to do that.
2. I'm interested in your thoughts about ways in which you think users could participate in submitting changes, and what skills you might have to make it easier:
a. Scripts to automatically accept uploaded source files and merge directly on he server if possible
b. Scripts to automatically host a set of HTML files from a specific version in the repository so someone can test a particular change submission
3. I have yet to complete the work on making the full game work in HTML5, but much of the game is playable now, so feel free to start looking into these processes as I continue this work.
4. Check out what permissions you have to update the Wiki. I think any SourceForge user should have permission. I invite you to update the "participate" page in the Wiki to describe how to participate in updating both the Wiki and the source files. When documenting the process on the "participate" page, note that:
a. The process is being documented by a user, and, likewise, anyone is welcome to contribute improvements to the Wiki.
b. The process is still under development, and the current description is just one (or a few) ways of sharing your changes.
c. Feel free to document multiple processes (Make your own fork or just use the free4all fork, or whatever else you learn).
If nobody is ready for this kind of involvement yet, I'll continue to work on HTML5 corrections and research more Mercurial features later.