Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 3, 2014 23:37 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872)
In reply to: Moving some of Python to GitHub? by mathstuf
Parent article: Moving some of Python to GitHub?

What do you mean, "mailing list"? What's wrong with personal email? It's not as if _that_ had been hard to come up with, after all. Unless something has changed, gmail ought to provide imaps access, so any normal MUA ought to work...

I really don't get it - all you need is an ability to pull from the tree hosted by whoever is hosting it and push to it (e.g. with gitolite(1)). Do pulls and merges in your local tree, then push the result into the mirroring public one. Allows to handle trivial conflicts conveniently, while we are at it, etc. Public tree (and its host) don't need to be aware of any of that. As for the buttons... what's wrong with cut'n'paste from mutt(1) into xterm running shell session?

Al, honestly confused...

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 1:06 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (4 responses)

"What do you mean, "mailing list"? What's wrong with personal email?"

You did read the part of the article that talked about 10-15 minutes for patches in email, as opposed to 1 minute for pull requests, right? :)

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 2:40 UTC (Thu) by bnorris (subscriber, #92090) [Link]

The article spoke about emailed patches being difficult. (This is debatable, but I'll admit it's not simple for the layperson to get right.)

Al is speaking about pull requests via email being simple.

Pull requests don't rule out the use of email.

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 3:29 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

You mean, like https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/20/101? You do realize that having it Cc'd to l-k is just a courtesy, right? Linus isn't subscribed to l-k, after all... And the same level of courtesy could be achieved by copying it to a blog somewhere - hell, to a facepuke page, if you are into that sort of thing and your contributors won't run away retching after being told to go there.

Not to mention that applying a patch series from mail is a matter of saving the messages in question into an empty mailbox, then saying git am -s filename_of_that_mbox. It's not as if you had to apply them one-by-one...

Seriously, folks, it's an argument in favour of git, not github. Sure, CPython workflow sucks - they are paying for having it cast in stone back when they were using CVS. "Branches are costly, merges - even more so and woe onto you if you make a mistake in one of those" kind of life - their workflow could be used as a demonstration of the reasons why using CVS is always a bad decision. One that will keep hurting you long after you switch to something else...

OT

Posted Dec 4, 2014 3:35 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> facepuke

I prefer "farcebook", but this one is decent too. (The farce refers to both the drama that plays out there and the one the company plays on its users-as-commodity.)

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 3:41 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

One aspect of CVS is that it can record different histories for different individual files and not "change sets". I said aspect, not benefit, but it's something that is not supported by other systems (erm, well, arch had a way, but that's because he tried to support everything and it kinda just happened).

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 2:56 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (1 responses)

For whatever reason, the browser is now *the* interface. For us, it's mutt, gnus, etc. But for the next generation, it's the browser. I receive baffled looks when I speak of having to open a web browser.

At least there finally is one GUI to rule them all. I suppose.

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 13:04 UTC (Thu) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> For whatever reason, the browser is now *the* interface. For us, it's mutt, gnus, etc. But for the next generation, it's the browser. I receive baffled looks when I speak of having to open a web browser.

> At least there finally is one GUI to rule them all. I suppose.

The browser is more a vt100 terminal or a X11 server. The "one GUI to rule them all" is yet to come: everybody who creates a web application these days has do recreate all its widgets or use a toolkit.

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 3:07 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

> What do you mean, "mailing list"? What's wrong with personal email? It's not as if _that_ had been hard to come up with, after all.

Did you miss where I'd rather contributions go to somewhere public rather than private email? Sure, I'll do it if necessary, but it's low in my preference list.

> Unless something has changed, gmail ought to provide imaps access, so any normal MUA ought to work...

Yep. And I use it exclusively (via mutt with help from vim, offlineimap, and esmtp).

> I really don't get it - all you need is an ability to pull from the tree hosted by whoever is hosting it and push to it (e.g. with gitolite(1)). Do pulls and merges in your local tree, then push the result into the mirroring public one. Allows to handle trivial conflicts conveniently, while we are at it, etc. Public tree (and its host) don't need to be aware of any of that.

And that's what I do…for my projects. Even GitHub pull requests get pulled, merged locally, then pushed. But not everyone does that.

> As for the buttons... what's wrong with cut'n'paste from mutt(1) into xterm running shell session?

Not every project uses email for patches. For those that use pull requests, GitHub is more convenient (and it isn't something Bitbucket can't implement; they just haven't).

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 3:45 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

So set a blog up and post copies of those requests there... And cut'n'paste part was very definitely *not* about patches - too high chances of whitespace damage that way. No, it's "select that line with git URL in your MUA, type 'git pull ' at shell prompt, paste the selection there and hit enter". That's why it's considered normal to use that format for pull request mail... I still don't get it. If you want discussion to happen in public, but not on a public maillist, fine, post exact same text wherever it is that you are discussing stuff. What's so special about github pull requests? I've only used github to clone (and fetch from) repositories hosted there, so I really have no such experience with them, but everything I've heard so far sounds quite unconvincing...

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 4, 2014 6:34 UTC (Thu) by cebewee (guest, #94775) [Link]

It easily provides some public development infrastructure, even for projects small enough I wouldn't bother to set up blogs, mailing lists, issue tracker et al.

For example, Hackages has a lot of small Haskell libraries, often developed by a single person. Due to them being on Github, I have a standardized platform for communicating issues with the maintainer (I can even use mail to continue the discussion on their issue tracker). And this infrastructure comes basically for free with the repository -- no need to setup a separate mailing list or whatever is the preferred form of communication for you. Otherwise, most wouldn't bother and you are back to private communication with the maintainer.

Moving some of Python to GitHub?

Posted Dec 9, 2014 16:25 UTC (Tue) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

> So set a blog up and post copies of those requests there...

Seriously, who has the time and willingness to set up a blog and manage the publication of requests in it?

> What's so special about github pull requests?

They work.

Without a fuss or without the need for a project owner to set up anything more than a git repository. No need to setup blog or worry about how to publish, store and backup anything etc.

It takes 1 piece of information to fork and send pull requests. A project at GH. Sending stuff to mailing lists often requires creating an account first, and finding the aforementioned mailing list before that. So a PR is just a way to contribute that has a much lower barrier to entry for someone already on GH.