how to apply an older patch in local GIT repository?

How can I copy someone else's existing GIT repository, edit it, and then push my changes back?

• Is "git clone" the correct command? Should I do "git init" first? "git checkout"?

• Answer:

  git clone will copy the repository (including history) to your dir and check out a local copy, you then can the edit and commit as you like. If you want to publish the changes to the original repository, you can use git push (this depends on permissions of course). If you are using github, you can additionally fork a repository to your own homedir and the clone from that, this means that you can push your own changes to your repository first and then request the changes to be pulled from your repository (this is called pull request in github). git init will create an empty repository that can be cloned or pushed to, this is not necessary when you already have a repository to clone from. git checkout is used to check out different revisions from the locally cloned repository to the local checked out sources, e.g. if you want to switch branches.