IIRC, you just need a commit different in order to open a PR with github. To make an empty commit:

    git commit --allow-empty -m 'Empty commit so I can open a PR'

Is that even necessary? I would have thought that simply making the branch and pushing it while it's on the same commit as the branch you're branching from would be enough.

You can't merge a branch that is even with another.

Well, sites like GitHub could be designed so the PR appears as merged from the beginning and then enabling the "merge" button, once more commits are available. Doing it this way also allows to naturally support merging a PR/MR more than once, which I don't know if it's undesirable, but it more closely aligns with what git supports.

I thought Github looked for an actual code difference in the PR creation process, but it seems you're correct! Thanks for the tip.

Well I personally like to start by writing the documentation first. That way your documentation changes become essentially your 'plan of attack' rather than having to write it out explicitly.

The way I've done this before is to have a directory in the project called TODO. In the directory, I add a file with the same name as the feature branch I'm going to work on. I put a description of the work I'm going to do (and any TODOs if I think of them). I commit that and submit a PR with the title "DO NOT MERGE -- whatever".

I find that nobody looks at them, though. :-)

In my team we'll just create a README or TODO and make a PR with that.