Dynamic git URL for Jenkins builds

Accepting pull requests that are slightly behind master seems perfectly fine to me, unless there's a strong reason to believe that conflicts are likely.

Ideally most of your pull requests should be on different parts of the codebase, and those parts should be decoupled enough that any one of them is very unlikely to break most of the others. In this case, forcing all but one of the requesters to update their pull requests is little more than red tape.

Also, in many cases it should be possible for you to verify things work when you accept these requests, because 1) you have automated tests (right?) and 2) pull requests should come with a minimal code example that is either fixed or enabled by that pull request, or at least a detailed enough description to produce such an example.

But what if you have several pull requests that clearly will conflict with each other? If they're all trying to do the same thing, pick the best one and ask the other requesters to test it to make sure it fixes the problem for everyone. If they're all trying to do different things to the same piece of code, and there's no sane way to detangle them (this should be very rare!), then I would bite the bullet and try doing some git surgery to combine them into a single pull request that you can ask everyone to test before accepting.

It doesn't matter when you create the fork because of the distributed nature of git, but github needs a fork in order to make the association necessary to create a pull request, and it also lets people searching your profile more easily make the association back to the original project. Without the fork, you break a lot of very helpful links.

In my local workspace, I usually like to set up one remote called upstream to more easily pull from the original, then have origin point to my fork. After you create a fork, you can use the instructions here to change your origin remote url, then just push to there like normal. That way you won't lose any of your existing history.