Is it possible to continue a pull request opened by someone else on Github?

Question

In a repository which is not mine, a third person opened a pull request. One of the owners suggested some changes to make before being able to merge it. However, the author of the pull request has not done it, and it remains open for several months without the modificqtions have been implemented.

Actually I am refering to a situation like this one.

I would make myslef the requested improvements.

What is the cleanest and best way to do this? Can I add my commits at the following or do I need to open a new pull request?

Answer 1

The only way to update a pull request is to push to the branch that's been PRed - so even the original repo's owner can't amend the PR, by default. It does make sense - for traceability's sake, at least.

So if you want to finish that work, the best thing you can do is to fork the original repo, clone it on your machine, add the PR's repo as a remote, checkout the PR'ed branch, commit on top of that, push those changes to your own fork, and make a new PR stating in the comments that it continues and fixes the other PR, so the original PR would get closed when yours' is merged.

In this case, something like:

$ # Go to https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio/ and fork it
$ git clone https://github.com/Delgan/cheerio/ && cd cheerio # assuming that's your GH username :)
$ git remote add pr-base https://github.com/digihaven/cheerio/
$ git fetch pr-base
$ git checkout pr-base/master -b 641-appendTo_prependTo
$ # work work work
$ git add #...
$ git commit -m 'Fixed all the things! See #641, fixes #726'
$ git push origin 641-appendTo_prependTo
$ # Go to your repo and make the PR
$ # ...
$ # SUCESS! (??!)