Contributing via GitHub

Posted Jan 10, 2026 20:27 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Evans: A data model for Git (and other docs updates)

I used GitGitGadget to make all of my contributions. This meant that I could make a GitHub pull request (a workflow I’m comfortable with) and GitGitGadget would convert my PRs into the system the Git developers use (emails with patches attached). GitGitGadget worked great and I was very grateful to not have to learn how to send patches by email with Git.

Interesting. I wonder whether that would work for the kernel?

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Contributing via GitHub

Posted Jan 10, 2026 23:54 UTC (Sat) by neggles (subscriber, #153254) [Link]

Could it? absolutely, but it requires maintainer buy-in and currently many kernel maintainers consider the difficulty of contributing via the mailing-list-patch-email workflow, to be a desirable feature, not a bug.

I don't entirely disagree; making it easier to contribute will tend to increase the volume of crappy contributions faster than high-quality ones, especially these days. But the difficulty hurdle doesn't just keep people from sending patches, it also keeps people from reviewing / testing them; the number of eyes on the mailing lists is high, but the number of eyes on a web based forge is much higher.

I don't know if it works out to a net benefit in practice, but some subsystems/maintainers seem pretty happy with their forge-based or forge-capable (via gitgitgadget style bridges) workflows, so as usual it's not a technical problem, but a social one.