GitHub Pull Request - "Allow edits by maintainers"

Question

I forked an upstream repo, clone it, and created a branch to work on some stuff

After I am done with the branch coding, I created a Pull Request. But at the page there is an checkbox for "Allow edits by maintainers"?

What does this mean? Does it mean, maintainers of upstream is able to modify my fork's branch?

This is so confusing

Answer 1

Yes, it means maintainers of the destination repository can modify the branch in your repository that the PR is based on (because that's how you modify a PR).

Why would you want to allow this? It makes it easier for maintainers to add a few commits before merging. Maybe there's some small typo to fix, or stylistic change they want to make. This way they can just make those changes and merge. Their other options are to ask you to do it (takes a long time), or pull the PR into their own branch to make changes before merging (same end result, but more work).

Typically you would make a PR from a branch you aren't planning to do more work on anyway — you delete that branch once the PR is merged, so it doesn't matter if there are extra commits on it. Those commits by maintainers will end up in your repository next time you pull from upstream anyway, right?