Why all maintainers use upstream branches for PRs?

[SirLouen]

One of the first things that shocked me when I started playing around was that every time I updated my local fork, I saw this:

And this

Why not use local forks to embrace the nature of GitHub?

[stokesman]

This seems a fair question but what benefits would it bring to have everyone using their own forks for PRs? To avoid the churn on my local repo, I’m in the habit of fetching only the branch I need.

[SirLouen]

This seems a fair question but what benefits would it bring to have everyone using their own forks for PRs? To avoid the churn on my local repo, I’m in the habit of fetching only the branch I need.

Generally I have an alias to drag from dozens of repos I've been historically working on. So basically I'm kind of lazy on picking the exact branch and specially i like to have all the official branches from "clean" repos available (i.e. php-src). So it feels a bit dirty. 🤷‍♂️

I had a conversation with Weston some weeks ago and he gave me some ideas. Theoretically, branches have a wider CI than PR (not sure if this happens in GB), also, it facilitates a pinch of collaboration, and ultimately, most are removed on merge by default. So I have acknowledged that is a bit messy but not terrible. Also I assume that this repo has protection for commits without PR (although I've seen a couple commits without a PR, so I'm assuming its comming from members with very high end permissions), so the risk of accidentally pushing to trunk when playing without a fork is not a thing.