create a pull request for a single commit made on a fork of a fork on github

Question

So,

I have the following situation. There is the original repo on github: Repo A. Also there is a fork that contained some great additions to that repo: Repo B.

So I forked Repo B and added some nice code. I created a pull request and the owner of Repo B asked me to make a pull request directly to Repo A instead.

The situation looks like this now:

Repo A (original)
     |
     ▼
Repo B (some great features)
     |
     ▼
Repo C (my fork, has some changes that need to go to Repo A directly)

But I cannot make a pull request directly to Repo A that hold only my changes. The reason is that there are several other changes (made to Repo B) that my change was based on. What I get when I create a pull request at the moment is all the changes made to Repo B plus the change I made to Repo C.

On github, I cannot make a second fork of a project since the name is already used.

So, what should I do now? Is there a command line work around to get this solved?

Answer 1

Add Repository A as a remote to your local repository:

git remote add repo-a <url>
git fetch repo-a

Create your own branch based on the branch you should open a pull request against. This is conventionally master, but check the README or CONTRIBUTING files for instructions.

git checkout -b my-feature repo-a/master

Now, you're on a branch called my-feature (name this for what you've done). Use cherry-pick to get the commit you made onto this branch where <hash> is the hash of your commit:

git cherry-pick <hash>

You now have a local branch ready for a pull request. Push that branch to your fork to publish it (assuming origin is the name of the remote for your fork):

git push origin my-feature

You can now open a pull request from my-feature on your fork to master in Repository A.