I have a repo on GitHub. Someone forked that repo and is doing some work in their fork. I want to fork their fork to help them before they do a pull request to get the repo back into the main repo which I own. Problem is that when I try and fork their for (of my repo) it won't allow me to fork that back into my "area."
What is the paradigm that's typically followed to achieve what I'm trying to do above?
I would recommend making a new branch off the branch you are both collaborating on, do the pull request and resolve merge conflicts there, then, when all is well, merge your branch into the development branch you guys are working on.
The way this is normally handled, is he would fetch from you before he
does his pull requests and he would resolve his own merge conflicts as
he would probably know best and this frees you up from needing to do
that. Another option, is to pull and fix conflicts yourself.
In a larger project, there would be one person who has this job, to solve all merge conflicts, In companies, this would be the person selected for doing deployment.
Good luck!
Source: Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
Please watch the source, as it really gave me an understanding on collaboration using git.