Github pull without a pull request

Question

On github, how is it possible for the owner of an original repository to pull the changes that were made in a fork by another user, without a pull request ? Or anyway include the fork's changes into the original repository, maintaining information about the fork's author?

Should I clone the fork and then push it to the original repository? Or I could copy them manually, but that wouldn't be fair at all, because the project would lose any information about the fork's changes author.

Answer 1

You would use the normal distributed workflow of Git here. That is, add the other repository as a second remote to your local repository, and then simply merge their changes in.

git remote add others-fork https://github.com/otheruser/fork.git
git fetch others-fork

git checkout master
git merge others-fork/master

This would merge the changes from their master into your local master. Afterwards, you can push your changes to publish their commits in your repository.