Thanks! I guess a problem I have is they've been sitting out there a while and my code base has changed a lot since they were posted. Any tricks there or would I just have to go through change by change?
If your code has changed enough that GitHub can’t automatically do the merge, you have to either do the merge yourself or ask the submitter to do it.
I expect that GitHub lets you do the merge yourself by adding the submitter’s fork as a remote to your clone and then doing a local merge with all your command-line tools, and finally pushing your merged version to GitHub. But I’ve never been in the situation to try it. I guess this would be what you call going through change by change. I’m afraid I don’t have any tips for doing merges in general.
If you’d rather ask the submitter to do the merge, post a comment in the issue saying “Sorry it took me so long to get to this. This diff no longer merges cleanly. Please merge the latest version of my code onto your branch, and I’ll merge your pull request right after that.” You can either ask them to update the branch in the existing pull request, or close that issue and ask them to create a new pull request for their new version.
