How I forked lemonbar-xft
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I decided to maintain my own fork of Lemonbar with support for Xft, because GitHub user krypt-n seems to have lost interest in their project.
My fork is on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/lemonbar-xft. Here I want to tell you the steps I followed to produce it.
Start by cloning upstream (all my links will be for SSH connections, which require an appropriately-configured GitHub account):
git clone git@github.com:LemonBoy/bar.git ~/lemonbar-upstream
Now also clone the fork with Xft support:
git clone git@github.com:krypt-n/bar.git ~/lemonbar-xft-discontinued
Switch to the upstream repo:
cd ~/lemonbar-upstream
Prepare to pull in the Xft fork:
git remote add xft ~/lemonbar-xft-discontinued
git fetch xft
Now create a new branch with the fork:
git checkout -b xft-port
Then merge master into xft-port:
git merge master
You are mostly done. I just added an extra file that explains what this fork is about. It is named “README-xft” and has the following:
Personal fork of Lemonbar with Xft support
==========================================
The purpose of this fork is to keep up with upstream while maintaining
the changes by GitHub user krypt-n who seems to have lots interest in
the project.[0]
The contributions by krypt-n allow Xft support (to use typefaces
supported by fontconfig). Upstream Lemonbar appears to be unable or
unwilling to merge them into master.[1]
I have decided to maintain this project, because I want to use it as
part of my custom desktop session on Debian 10 Buster.[2]
[0]: https://github.com/krypt-n/bar/pull/37#issuecomment-473265449
[1]: https://github.com/LemonBoy/bar/issues/188
[2]: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/dotfiles
Lastly, I did the following to push my fork to GitLab:
git remote add lemonbar-xft-current git@gitlab.com:protesilaos/lemonbar-xft.git
git push -u lemonbar-xft-current --all
Done! Read my previous entry on how to compile this fork on Debian 10 Buster.