best/safest practice for interacting with github

[Ernie Rael]

Greetings,

It's been over 5 years, but I am again going to work with NetBeans 
source, do some pull requests... It is now on github. I've never used 
git. I used hggit to clone the repo; then made a github fork, moved my 
path to my fork. Cool, so far seems OK.

Now I'm looking at the NB docs and see stuff like "then do 'git config 
--global user.name "John Doe"' " and also a cmd for email. The 'git 
remote add upstream ...' so I can submit PULL REQUESTS certainly has me 
confused.

I'm considering using git to clone my github fork to local, then point 
my current hggit clone to the local github clone. The idea is that I 
might want to do stuff (NB docs) locally before pushing to github. Is 
this needed and/or a good idea?

-ernie

PS. I recall years ago seeing somewhere about running git and hg 
commands both in the same clone, but that seems fraught with danger.