I recently started managing a project on GitHub where people have been submitting pull requests. Rather than merge them to master, I would like the ability to:
First vet them to make sure they actually work
Possibly making some stylistic changes before merging to master
How can I do this?
Do you have to make a separate branch, such as "dev", and instruct people to code against that before you merge to master?
A faster way of doing things with GitHub is to use this GitHub feature presented by Zach Holman in his GitHub Secrets II Talk (video).
git fetch origin pull/id/head:name
Where id is the pull request id, head is the remote branch (on the fork), and name is the name you want to give the local branch. For example:
git fetch origin pull/12/head:pr
Fetches pull request #12 into a branch named pr.
You can add this as an alias in git if you use this a lot.
There is a github help page on this which details how to make changes to a pull request by checking out pull requests locally.
What I might try is first creating a remote for the pull request submitter (I'm using the examples from the above page):
git remote add kneath git://github.com/kneath/jobs.git
Fetch the changes:
git fetch kneath
Check out the branch in question (ex. master):
git checkout kneath/master
Vet them however you like, since the code that will be there will be the pull request code. Run tests, etc.
Merge them in if you're good to go:
git checkout master
git merge kneath/master
Further, here is a very good page on git project management workflows which details the various workflows one can take on collaboration integration.
