@lieryan Is there anything I can do to remove the do-nothing previous 5 commits from further PRs?

I've never used or understood squash or rebase.

I suppose the reason why you keep seeing the do-nothing commits is because these commits are in your local master. Assuming that origin is the rope's main repository master, you'll want to git reset origin/master to set your local master to the main repository's master. You'll also want to make sure that your fork's master doesn't contain these additional commit, so after you git reset your local branch, you'll want to git push --force ekr-rope master:master.

For more complex situations, for example if your master do contain something you want to preserve, you're going to want to use git rebase to select the commits to preserve, but if you just want to sync up with main repository, then git reset is simpler.

@lieryan Many thanks for your help.