Question

I have a gist on GitHub that someone forked and made changes to. I like their changes.

Is there a way to merge the changes back into my original gist?

Answer 1

A gist operates like any other repository. So let’s say you’ve cloned something like git://gist.github.com/2322786.git:

$ git clone [e-mail]:2322786.git

(If you just wanted to try this without pushing, you can use git://gist.github.com/2322786.git, which will demonstrate the merge principle and works anonymously, but does not allow you to push.)

And now you want to merge in changes from git://gist.github.com/2661995.git. Add it as an additional remote:

$ git remote add changes git://gist.github.com/2661995.git
$ git fetch changes

And then merge in the changes like this:

$ git merge changes/master

And you should be all set. This should work regardless of whether the new gist was forked from yours at some previous point or is completely unrelated.

Taking Romain’s comment into account, you would then issue a push:

$ git push

This would only work if your original clone URL allows writing.