On: Merge Pull Request Considered Harmful

[eevilspock]

What about submitting a PR with your cleanup to the original PR's branch? That person reviews and accepts, then submits a new PR back to you.

I haven't learned git yet so maybe my assumption that the original PR is on a branch/repo clone to which you can submit a PR is incorrect?

[jessaustin → eevilspock]

You totally could do that, but it doesn't really help with the lack of interest problem he described. If the contributor can't be arsed to fix their patch, can we expect them to be arsed to merge a patch to their patch and then re-PR it?

[gknoy → jessaustin]

Since PRs on Github auto-update when the branch they are based on is updated, they would not need to create a new pull request:

Bob requests that Alice merge bob/bob-feature into alice/master.

Alice requests that Bob merge alice/fix-bob-to-conform-to-pep8 into bob/bob-feature.

Bob merges that into bob/bob-feature, and Bob's PR into Alice's repo is now auto-updated to reflect the changes that he merged into his branch.

Alice is now satisfied, and merges bob/bob-feature with alice/master.

[jessaustin → gknoy]

Good point; thanks for the info! Under the hypothesis that Bob is lazy, however, he still might not perform that merge...