Git: Ignoring certain commits when pushing

Question

I'd like to have some modifications that are private to my fork. How do I go about doing this?

There's a question here about pushing a single commit, and the answer is to cherry-pick the commits you want to push from a private branch and put them on the main branch. However, I would like something more along the lines of ignoring a certain commit when pushing.

Answer 1

If those commits are part of commits not yet pushed, you can:

• reoder them (rebase --interactive) to put them as the most recent commits
  (actually, if they are sequential, you can rebase --onto another branch altogether)
• make a branch "private" to mark the tip if the current "dev" branch
• reset that dev branch to the last commit before those private ones
• push dev branch.

So the solution still involves a "private" branch in the process, but more importantly it is about isolating (hence the branch) the part of history which is not made to be published, ending up with a clearer "public" history for you to publish (push).

Answer 2

why not make a fork of the main branch and ask the owner of that branch to make a pull? Kind of like github style?