How can I include commits from various forks of a GitHub repo?

Question

A repo has various pull-requests and other fixes in some of its forks (no pull-request) that are noted in comments in the 'Issues' section. How do I go about gathering all the scattered fixes and committing them?

This is the main repo I refer to.

Some of the commits I would like to add are in this fork and this fork.

Plus miscellaneous ones mentioned in this pull-request (which has not been pulled, even though requested ages ago), namely the pbaker ones.

What is the best way to go about creating a new repo/fork that combines them all?

Answer 1

You can:

• add those forks as remote repo (git remote add)
• fetch them: git remote update (see "pull/push from multiple remote locations")
• merge or cherry-pick the commits you want.

Now, this isn't the ideal workflow: you should pull from only one fork (and only if you can apply its fixes in a fast-foward manner), then ask the other forks to rebase their history on top of your own updated branch.
And then repeat the process for another fork.

However, in the case of truly distributed development, this "ideal" scenario doesn't scale well.
Hence the idea to merge/cherry-pick everything you need, even if that means for the forks to reset their own master branches.