Open a pull request between two different remotes do not work correctly.

[tht2005]

Describe the bug

I have two branch a (from remote r1) and branch b (from remote r2), and i open a pull request from branch b to branch a. But in the web interface i see it open a pull request from branch b (remote r1) to branch a (remote r1).

Expected behavior

It should open a pull request from branch b (remote r2) to branch a (remote r1).

[ChrisMcD1]

Can you give a bit more context on this? In particular, are these two remotes on the same hosting platform, as in both are on GitHub?

I could imagine a possible solution to this if both are on the same hosting platform, but if one is on GitHub and one on GitLab, I imagine it would be totally impossible.

[tht2005]

Can you give a bit more context on this? In particular, are these two remotes on the same hosting platform, as in both are on GitHub?

I could imagine a possible solution to this if both are on the same hosting platform, but if one is on GitHub and one on GitLab, I imagine it would be totally impossible.

Yes it's on the same hosting platform.

[ChrisMcD1]

Cool, makes sense! Our multi-remote functionality isn't that strong right now. I vaguely remember looking into this back when I was thinking more about multi-remote setups and writing #4292. I ended up not finishing that PR at time of writing this because I found a workaround that works for me.

It might not work for you, but my main use case for multi-remote's is when I am contributing to an open source project. I now set up my remotes such that origin points to my fork, and upstream points to the project I am contributing to. Then when I go to push branches, the "push" field will default to origin <my_local_branch_name> which is what I want, and then I can just o to create a pull request into the default branch. For GitHub's case, this results in lazygit generating the URL:

https://github.com/ChrisMcD1/lazygit/compare/other-branch?expand=1

which GitHub, since it knows ChrisMcD1/lazygit is a fork of jesseduffield/lazygit, helpfully creates as a cross-remote pull request from ChrisMcD1/lazygit/other-branch to jesseduffield/lazygit/master as this URL:

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/compare/master...ChrisMcD1:lazygit:other-branch?expand=1

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I don't precisely remember the problem with "just adding" the remote string into the URL, but I think it came down to how the different git service providers handle cross-remote PRs. I think github was decently reasonable, but others like azure devops wanted you have a repositoryId, which was an opaque identifier that we had no way of knowing. (I could be wrong on this point, I don't have an Azure Devops remote I can test on)

I stopped my work at that point, since I had no way of proceeding in a way that would keep lazygit consistent across remotes. If @stefanhaller is open to it, I think there is some world we could improve cross-remote support for Github above the other service providers.

[stefanhaller]

I use the same workflow that Chris described (origin is my fork, pressing o "just works"). Are you using shift-O, @tht2005?

My problem with shift-O is that I have never even understood what it is supposed to do, so I really can't say much about it at this point. That's definitely something we need to improve. If not even the maintainer understands what a feature does, how are users supposed to? 😄

Also connected to #4775 (comment).