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

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