Once I made a PR of a repo, should I delete my fork?

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Once I made a PR of a repo, should I delete my fork?

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#1 by (9 votes)

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Working with a free project on GitHub, I made a fork of it, made some changes and asked for a PR, which was accepted.

I updated my fork upstream and kept making other changes, and then going back to doing another PR.

At that moment, I realized that my new PR included all the commits I had already made, and even all the files.

It was assumed that when doing the upstream, I should have been up to date, but either I failed at something, or my fork never heard about the accepted PR.

To avoid that, I made a branch with only the modified files. However, the PR of that branch still includes all the commits I made.

Not so with the files, only the modified one goes.

So, what is the correct way to work when you fork a project?

Should I have executed some more command besides the upstream? Or do I just have to empty my fork after each PR and go back to work as if it were zero?

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asked by gbianchi 12.04.2018 в 22:02

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1 answer

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score 9 · Accepted Answer

Sounds like you're going to be collaborating with this project for a long time, not because you want to fix a bug and disappear.

In that case, you can do the following:

Never touch master . On your fork, master reflects the status of the original project.

The first time, set a remote upstream that points to the original project, making git remote add upstream https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git .

Make all your changes always in a branch. Imagine that you are working on the branch feature-guau . You can do quiet push, all that remains on your fork.

Once you want to send a PR, you make a PR of tufork/feature-guau to proyecto-original/master .

The mantainer asks you to work on your PR, every change you make you keep uploading to your branch (that updates the PR)

Once the mantainer merges the PR, it happens to be in your master ... but not in yours!

What you have to do now is to get the master of upstream . For that:

Make git checkout master (that makes you go to work in your master (which is out of date).
Make git fetch upstream (that makes your computer "know" what is in upstream/master , but does not make changes)
Make git reset --hard upstream/master . That makes your master equal to the master of the original repository. As your PR was merged, he brought it.
Finally, you have to update your fork ... for that, you can do git push -f . That will make your fork point to exactly the same place as the original project.

Step 7 you can do at any time, regardless of whether your PR was merged or not ... what it does is synchronize master .