Marking a repo as a fork in github, after the fact

Question

We have a project that was forked a while back mostly via a copy/paste method. But there is still significant overlap between the repos.

Is it possible to retroactively mark this fork as a fork to github, so that functions like compare and pull requests will do the right thing?

Note: I have tried the "hack" below, of forking anew, cloning the fork, copying the "forked" content over, then git add/commit/push. However, the file histories in the original "fork" are lost, and branches don't come over.

Answer 1

As you don't want to "squash" your commits into a single file what you could do is:

• Fork the "original" repository
• Create a pull request from your "copy and paste" repo to the fork

Or you could take a look at how to merge two repositories like in this post. Like they did there you could add your "c&p repo" to the fork as a subtree, like it is explained in detail over here.

This are the steps taken in the guide:

git remote add -f c&prepo /path/to/c&prepo git merge -s ours --no-commit c&prepo/master git read-tree --prefix=vendor/c&prepo/ -u c&prepo/master git commit 

However even with those methods you aren't able to merge the whole repositories but only specific branches. What you could do is i.e. create a pull request (described in my first method) for each branch, which could take up some time depending on your branching model.

I don't think there actually is a solution where you can merge two different repositories while keeping their commit history and branches at the same time. Best of luck to you.