Mercurial vs Git – Why Pull Requests Are Challenging in Mercurial

Have you considered to use named branches for your feature branches? This way you can develop a feature by committing to it as often as you want, while the master branch is not polluted by these commits. When a feature is ready you merge the corresponding feature branch into your master branch. This will produce a merge changeset which only contains the difference between the feature branch and the master branch. When we started to use Mercuial we also used a workflow where we separated feature development solely by separate clones. However, since we use name branches life got much easier for us. The changesets are cleanly separated and you can have all branches within one repository without getting confused. Furthermore, you can switch between different branches easily. And as I said, you get a much cleaner history.

No they shouldn't, if avoidable. It's a problem that in my experience happens far too often. However I believe it is more to do with ignorance of how to use git correctly than somebody wanting to steal credit.

• If they want to modify your change before applying it to their main branch, they can easily create a branch for your change. They can then add their own commit after yours and then merge the branch in.
• If your pull request is not based on the latest version of their main branch, then they can issue a git rebase master. If there are conflicts they can either choose to fix the conflicts themselves (without changing author), or give you the chance to fix it.

I think Github could and should look for this kind of accidental credit stealing and educate maintainers on best practices when appropriate.