Github Draft Pull Request is Interesting

Over the past five weeks, I followed my professor’s guidelines to build an app that combines multiple files into one. My classmates built similar apps in their own ways. My task was to add TOML support to a classmate’s project, which I hadn’t reviewed before.

I forked his repo, opened an issue, and created a draft PR. I didn’t know about draft PRs before—usually I finish everything before opening a PR. I found two benefits:

1. The repo owner and contributors can see my progress and know someone is working on it.
2. The draft PR shows conflict status after each commit, so I know when to merge the latest changes from the main branch.

For merging, I can use GitHub’s web UI or do it locally:

• Web merge: simple—if there are no conflicts, it’s just one click.
• Local merge: add the original repo as a remote, pull the feature branch, run git merge, resolve any conflicts, then push. The PR updates automatically.

I prefer merging locally because I can review changes in my dev environment and test the features after merging. But if CI passes and there are no conflicts, the GitHub merge button is fine.