Today's horrible computer discovery: Github will not let you create a pull request from repo A to repo B unless there is specifically a fork relationship in github.com's database from repo A to repo B. It doesn't help for the git commits to simply be all the same. If there is a way to create this fork relationship after the fact I couldn't find one, so I wound up renaming a github repo to move it out of the way, then forking a new one, then rerunning the git push
@mcc well, ok, what experience with what VCS/what hosted repo led you to expect this? (I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m curious because this feature seems sorta off the path for any way I’ve used git)
@jason I pull commits from repository A. I then push those same commits to repository B. If add a new commit to repository B, I can also add that same commit to repository A. Every VCS works this way, except github, which isn't actually a VCS, it's just a UI to another VCS, and it is refusing to let me do something the underlying VCS (git) can do
@jason In fact, git in particular will allow you to push commits from repository B to repository A even if they do not share a common root commit. Not only is this supported, it is a recommended use case in github (it is how gh-pages works)
@mcc right, and you can make arbitrary new branches from “nothing” too; I’ve done that.
You can add both repos as remotes and push and pull from both into a single local repo, but it sounds like you mean using the UI to create a pull request “object”, too?
@jason Yeah. As I see it the PR feature in github is basically a combination of "diff" and "merge" in another git GUI. Anytime "diff" between two branches/commits would make sense, I think PR makes sense too.
In this particular case, my "user story" is that my repo B was a fork of repo A, but it was forked when repo A was private and I had advance access. Then repo A went public and the fork relationship somehow got broken. There may(?) be more than one defect in github leading to this point.
@whitequark@mcc on the plus side, GitHub support is ridiculously good. Even free randos get better support than you'd expect from, say, a six-figure corporate AWS support contact
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