Since forking a repository is so easy on GitHub, a number of people tend to do it thinking they want to play with the source, but then never actually push back into their fork. Meanwhile, development continues on the main branch, and it’s a little annoying to have to add them as a remote and merge in order to get back up to date. So, we’ve added a new button to your repository details that will show up if you forked a project, didn’t push to it, and the source repo has moved on:
If you click on ‘Fast Forward’, it will move all your branches up to wherever the repository you originally forked from now is. Now all of those of you who forked Rails months ago and never did anything with it and are thinking of trying again, go forth and Fast Forward.
That’s a nice feature for those of us who dream of helping out and get side-tracked. Awesome.
I can’t see it on my repo.
It will only show up if :
If that is true and you still don’t see it, let me know the name of the project and I’ll check it out.
I’m assuming those are all and conditions.
Is there any way to fast forward to the latest commit even if you have pushed?
What about people who’d like to rebase their changes on the original repository’s HEAD?
I’d like to do that with my fork…
I second bdude’s desire to see this even if you have pushed. If it’s a clean fast-forward, I’d love to have the button.
Of course, it’s more work to check if there’s been a push.
And a nice to have would be that even if I pushed to my fork, but only made changes on another branch (e.g. a ‘bugfixes’ branch) without modifying master at all I should be able to fast forward master.
When I contribute a patch to another project I usually do those changes on a branch on my fork so that I don’t pollute master with my commit which the owner of the repo may or may not choose to merge into the parent repo.
Worked great for me. Good job. github rocks!!
Can you include this information on the git guides please?