Github: How do I pull unmerged upstream pull requests in to my fork?

Question

Situation:

• There is a repo on Github: http://github.com/otheruser/reponame. This repo has 24 unmerged pull requests.
• I have forked it to http://github.com/myusername/reponame.

Problem:

• The upstream repo seems to be unmaintained because some of those pull requests are a year or more old.
• I want some of those 24 unmerged pull requests in my fork, but can't figure out how to get them. (I would be willing to accept them all, if it's not possible to take only some.)

I have not made any changes to my fork, so it's basically a clone of the upstream repo. It seems like this should be pretty straightforward, but I can't quite figure it out. I've tried a handful of approaches, but none quite seem to work.

• After cloning my fork to my local machine, I was able to gain access to the pull requests using the approach outlined here. However, when I attempted to merge the branches, it failed.
• Likewise, I tried to create patches directly from Github, but git am failed to apply them successfully.

Thanks in advance for your help!

P.S. This question was asked here with no response.

Answer 1

Have you tried adding the repos that sent the pull requests as remotes, and merging their master/whatever branch into your master branch?