Best practice for tracking upstream in fork on github

Question

Summary: What are the best practices for handling long running tracking of upstream repositories where you want to maintain a set of local changes?

I want to keep a fork

Answer 1

You are incorrect in your assumption. You said in your text example that you would be running the git merge command. If you really meant this, and not git cherry-pick (and for the record, git-merge is the best practice in the situation) then you do NOT get F` in your branch, you get F. Perhaps a picture:

After the fetch but before the merge, your repos look like this:

Upstream:
A-B-C-D-E-F  [master]


Fork:    /-F                  [upstream/master]
A-B-C-D-E ----- P ------T     [master]
         \-L-M-/ \-Q-R-/      [Other branches]

After you merge, your repo will look like this:

Fork:    /-F-------------\    [upstream/master]
A-B-C-D-E ----- P ------T-U   [master]
         \-L-M-/ \-Q-R-/      [Other branches]

New commit "U" in your repo will be a merge commit, just like commits "P" and "T".

git cherry-pick would create "F'" as you indicated in your example. Don't do that. git rebase can sometimes support rebasing branches git rebase -p but it doesn't always work. Also, that is rewriting public history, which is a bad idea.

I have a document on git best practices: Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once You might specifically want to investigate the workflow section for further inspiration.