Hi,
it seems that the Exercism github repo is closed. I was about to do a pull request and they shut the whole thing down. I have created 8 new exercises for the COBOL track: acronym, all-your-base, atbash-cipherr, binary, circular-buffer, complex-numbers, matching-brackets, pascals-triangle
If you would like to add these to the track, you may find them here: GitHub - kapitaali/exercism-cobol-track: Exercism exercises in COBOL.
Hi @kapitaali. The GitHub repo isn’t closed. We just ask people to discuss things they’re doing on this forum before submit PRs, otherwise we get very overloaded with drive-b contributions, which are often very low quality. Your PR is obviously not low-quality and I’ve reopened it 
I could have appreciated some sort of guidelines as to what is expected when doing a pull request, like if you would need just the .cob and .cut files (which the pull request was about to contain before I realized that there were hidden directories with solutions) or do you need a pull request submitter to solve the exercises. I tried to look around and was not able to find anything. Luckily I did them myself.
This is the main reason we suggest people discuss things before doing PRs btw. A quick chat before getting started can save the contributor and the review tons of time (e.g., a maintainer can comment on one exercise, not eight exercises, and you have to do 8x less refactoring/changing).
That’s not to undermine your work, which I’m very grateful for and am sure is great, but as you say this is your first ever Pull Request, it might be useful to know that most open source projects suggest discussing changes first to help minimise the review/refactoring work
Thank you for your reply. Yes I have pretty much zero idea as to how pull requests work, but your reply is informative and I now know how to do this in the future. But the link that automatically closed the pull request pointed to an Exercism blog post that was talking about something different, so now that you have elaborated on how things work, I might continue contributing.
@kapitaali if you want to add another 8 or more, there’s a few red X on https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24/implementation_status that could be done.
I might have messed up again with git, I’m not sure but I already got some sort of email about failed builds. It was my intention to fetch the latest status of the repo, not send/commit anything from my side yet, so if you could check that everything is ok there, I’d appreciate it. If not ok, please revert back to yesterday’s status.
I can’t see any PRs for your submissions.
@kapitaali do you want to build a .tar.gz of you work and send it to me? Maybe @ErikSchierboom can tell me how to have github.com credit you the points even though i submit the work.
I can do it like that too. Where would I send the file?
bruce dot axtens at gmail dot com
Great, I’ll send you a couple new exercises.
I tried to send four new exercises, but gmail blocks them. As per this page
gmail does not allow .ps1 files to be included as attachments. The exercism tree contains .ps1 files.
I can try to do github pull request later.
fair enough. Or you can bundle them up in a compressed archive like zip or tar.gz or 7z.
git is a pretty common dev tool. You can also view this as a good opportunity to figure out how to use it 
If you’re having trouble with git, someone on the Exercism Discord might be able to help you through things. GitHub also have some really really good documentation walking you through the steps.
For completeness: Githubs Docs on Git.
But you don’t have to use GitHub to use git the two are not the same thing.
And git also has an email workflow, should you want to use that. I’ve used it via gmail, so I don’t think its blocked. According to this quote, the email workflow for git doesn’t really touch your email client:
Also, one thing to note about the process above is that, except for receiving the feedback, it will never touch your mail client. Git does SMTP itself and make sure the emails you send out are up-to-spec so maintainers can apply the changes directly by feeding the email into
git am
Some other git email resources:
Thanks.
I opened a pull request. Workflow already failed though.
@axtens – looks like the CI choked on downloading GNUCobol?? Not sure what is going on there: Four new exercises by kapitaali · Pull Request #123 · exercism/cobol · GitHub
I can’t reopen the PR, since I’m not on the repo.
It complains about Node:
Node.js 16 actions are deprecated. Please update the following actions to use Node.js 20: actions/checkout@ee0669bd1cc54295c223e0bb666b733df41de1c5, actions/cache@704facf57e6136b1bc63b828d79edcd491f0ee84. For more information see: GitHub Actions: Transitioning from Node 16 to Node 20 - The GitHub Blog.
I’m trying to track down the updated appveyor link. I’ve written to @gitmensch but haven’t heard back as yet