Question

Converting an issue to a pull-request is easy using the hub command:

hub pull-request -i 123

But how do you go the other way and convert a pull-request back into an issue?

Answer 1

You can’t convert the pull-request back to an issue.
The conversion to a pull-request is done by hub with the github api.
There is no reverse feature in the api.

If however your intention is to remove commits from a pull-request,
then you want to change the branch the pull-request is based off and do a git push -f.

Merging the request will only include the commits that are in the branch at the time of the merge.
However, you can’t fully hide these old commits.
They are still seen in the history/comments of the pull-request.

---

You can delete the feature branch on github. The pull-request will contain the last known commits.
If a pull-request is merged, changes in the feature branch afterwards have no effect on the request.

---

github-cli installs a tool called ghi to work with github issues from the command line, using the github api.
However, since the api does not provide a “downgrade” of pull-requests to issues, this tool doesn’t either.