Cannot resolve GitHub conflict in PR

Question

I have a PR in a GitHub repository (some one else his PR), which cannot be merged because of conflicts.

What can I do to fix those conflicts by myself?

I tried the following:

1. Create new branch from PR
2. Checkout, pull and merge master
3. Fix the conflicts manually. Lot of work.
4. Test it locally, it works. :)
5. Stage all the files git add .
6. Commit and push
7. Create a new PR
8. And then still the message "This branch has conflicts that must be resolved".

What I'm doing wrong? Locally everything works and git status reports:

On branch branch2 Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/branchX'.

nothing to commit, working directory clean

PS: If I redo "merge master", all the conflicts are back. Don't get this.

Answer 1

The usual workflow is:

• make sure yo have the latest master from upstream, upstream being the name of the remote referencing the original repo in a triangular workflow)

git fetch upstream

Then you create your own branch (in your own fork, where you have fetch the PR branch from another fork)

git checkout -b branch2 otherfork/PRbranch

And you rebase that branch on top of upstream/master

This is key: no merge: rebase only, that way, you will resolve conflicts, and the resulting history of branch2 will be additional commits on top of upstream/master, which will make the PR a simple fast-forward merge when applied (merged) to master in the original repo (the upstream one).