Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzelinskie | Hacker News Reader

They should really make another branch before making any changes and then offer that branch up for the merge, once it gets merged they can delete the branch and fast-forward the master branch. The other options would simply be using a form of "git reset" or "git rebase" to clean up their branch.

View on HN

Yes, they could work from a branch, but then we'd have to give them read-write to the repo. There's no per-branch access control.

Working on a branch in their fork doesn't help. They still can't pull in updates from the original repo.

They can update their branch in their own repo manually ("git pull upstream; git push origin" or equivalent on their development machines).

Still it'd be awesome if GitHub supported this via a Web interface.

They kinda do... make a new pull request on the GitHub website, pulling from upstream into your fork, then accept it. It works quite well, except for the extra merge commit.

I think there might be some confusion here. All I suggested was the git flow model[1] AKA forking, making your own branch, changing things, and making a pull request on that branch and if it gets merged, you delete the branch and fast-forward master.

I don't see why they can't pull in updates from the original repo. Are they not adding it as a remote?

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

"I don't see why they can't pull in updates from the original repo."

Because github doesn't provide a way to do that on the site. Git workflows that can be achieved entirely on github.com were that subject of the story, and my original comment.

Ah, I was a bit confused. GitHub's kind of in-between being a web-UI for git and simply a storage bin for git repos. If they wanted to add the functionality to pull (fetch and merge) they'd have to implement a lot more functionality to handle conflicts. Have you tried looking at the native GitHub clients? They might provide the functionality you're looking for.

I think jzelinskie's point is that if they make no changes on the main branch in their fork then they can fast forward that main branch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com