Splitting (Breaking down) Pull Requests

Sometimes maintainers will ask you to break your Pull Request (PR) into smaller ones. To do that, please follow the steps outlined below.

1. Do a soft-reset to the beginning of the branch you used for submitting the original Pull Request (your-PR-branch):

   git reset --soft $(git merge-base gh-pages your-PR-branch)

2. Create a new branch for a (smaller) pull request:

   git checkout -b new-branch1 gh-pages

3. (Optional | Advanced) If you need to unstage some of the changes from the files you modified, do so with git reset -p. If you need to stage in (add to the "Staging area") some new changes, do so with git add -p

   git reset -p HEAD some-file.ext 
   # or
   git add -p some-other-file.ext

4. Commit a subset of files for a (smaller) pull request:

   git commit -m "Message" some-file.ext some-other-file-if-needed.ext

5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 using different branch names and files.

6. Rebase branches created in step 5 on top of the gh-pages branch:

   git rebase gh-pages new-branch2
   git rebase gh-pages new-branch3

   Do not rebase the first branch (called new-branch1 in these notes).