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If someone forks your repository and commits some changes, what is the accepted way to proceed if you'd like to ask them whether it's alright to pull those changes in?

Can you issue a pull request on the forker's behalf and count on GitHub to alert them somehow? If not -- I notice GitHub doesn't support sending users messages; should you somehow contact the user outside of the site?

edit - By the way, both the question and answer are obviously different from the Q&A linked as "duplicate".

Community
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Greg
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    [Sharing your research helps everyone](http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6559/why-is-research-important). Tell us what you've tried and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and most of all it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer. Also see [ask] – gnat Oct 06 '14 at 13:40
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    @gnat - it's a pretty straightforward question and I don't have any way to test this experimentally without knowing the internals of github; also, I'm asking about standard and accepted practices, which I can't "research" any way other than asking – Greg Oct 06 '14 at 13:42
  • 1. create new github user, fork your own project, make changes, switch to old user, make pull request, switch to new user and see if there's any notification. or... contact github support :) – gbjbaanb Oct 06 '14 at 13:44
  • @gbjbaanb - okay, I'll try it out and report back, thanks – Greg Oct 06 '14 at 13:47
  • ... and they managed you to answer your own question. That's what Q&A is for. – JensG Oct 06 '14 at 14:07
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    @Caleb - Nah, I read the other post. Didn't answer my question; just said it's nice to ask. – Greg Oct 06 '14 at 14:10
  • http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/194476/165773 – gnat Oct 06 '14 at 14:14
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    @Greg I can't tell whether you're really asking whether you *should* contact the author (last line of question, answered in the accepted answer in the dupe) or *how* to contact the author (seems to be answered by your observation that Github doesn't have a built-in messaging system). Perhaps you could clarify what you want to know. – Caleb Oct 06 '14 at 14:17
  • @Caleb like I said already, I'm asking about standard practices for this situation and how users are expected to follow through with them -- e.g. is there a particular feature to "request a request"; every answer so far was basically "I have no idea; go create a fake user account and try it yourself until you find something" – Greg Oct 06 '14 at 14:19

3 Answers3

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If you want to message them via GitHub, why not use Mention Notifications? Open an issue on your own repository and mention the forker in that issue. The issue should be relevant to the stuff you want to pull, so you can discuss the pull request they need to send. Something like "@JohnSmith has already implemented this feature - can you please make a pull request?".

Idan Arye
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Did they ask you if it was OK to fork in the first place? No, because it's open source. I'd say you can take their changes as long as you abide by the licencing terms without having to worry whether their (sorry, your) open source project code is open source.

If they didn't want you to take the changes, they wouldn't release them as open source (though, obviously this would mean not starting with your work). So just go for it.

Peter Mortensen
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gbjbaanb
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    To be clear, I'm not worried about the legality of it, just the common decency. Just because the changes are available doesn't necessarily mean they're ready to be merged and on top of that it's just polite to ask. – Greg Oct 06 '14 at 13:46
  • @Greg: If said project creator did not want arbitrary people to merge in changes, they can configure github to do so. Fork all you want because it can't mess up their branch. Presumably you need credentials to merge back in. – Thomas Eding Oct 06 '14 at 23:35
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In general, I don't bother looking at the network of people who forked my repositories. If they want to commit the changes upstream, they'll send me a PR and we'll start a dialogue in that thread. It gets too cumbersome to track people down and ask them for a PR otherwise.

Seiyria
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