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”.
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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?”.
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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.
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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.
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