Not a lawyer, but I think the standard way to do this would be to "clean room" it. You notice that the GPL'd fork made this change, and instead of changing it you write to a co-developer "Our `name` variable is too short; it should be one byte longer. Could you fix this?"
The idea that `name` is short by a byte isn't protected, just the literal code.
(It's quite likely that this particular change is too trivial to be covered by copyright, but the chilling effects reach wide enough here that it might not be worth risking it.)
The idea that `name` is short by a byte isn't protected, just the literal code.
(It's quite likely that this particular change is too trivial to be covered by copyright, but the chilling effects reach wide enough here that it might not be worth risking it.)