Lately I've been doing some work with the manipulateWidget package,
which lives on Github at
https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/. Last week I
found a bug, so being a good community member, I put together a patch.
Since the package lives on Github, I followed instructions to put
together a "pull request":
- I forked the main branch to my own Github account as
<https://github.com/dmurdoch/manipulateWidget>.
- I checked out my fork into RStudio.
- I fixed the bug, and submitted the pull request
<https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/pull/47>.
Then I felt good about myself, and continued on with my work. Today I
tracked down another bug, unrelated to the previous one. I know enough
about git to know that I shouldn't commit this fix to my fork, because
it would then become part of the previous pull request.
So I created a branch within my fork, and committed the change there.
But Github provides no way to create a pull request that only includes
the new stuff! Every attempt I made would have included everything from
both bug fixes.
I've read online about creating a new branch based on the master copy,
and "cherry picking" just the final change: but all the instructions
I've tried so far have failed.
Okay, I know the solution: I need to burn the whole thing down (to
quote Jenny Bryan). I'll just create a new fork, and put the new bug
fix in a branch there.
I can't! I don't know if this is a Git restriction or a Github
restriction, but it won't let me create a new fork without deleting the
old one. I don't know if deleting the previous fork would also delete
the previous PR, so I'm not going to do this.
This is ridiculous! It is such an easy concept: I want to take the
diff between my most recent commit and the one before, and send that
diff to the owners of the master copy. This should be a trivial (and it
is in svn).
Git and Github allow the most baroque arrangements, but can't do this
simple task. That's an example of really bad UI design.
Duncan Murdoch