So The One Aspect That Is Not In Dispute...

Posted Dec 9, 2014 14:47 UTC (Tue) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589)
In reply to: So The One Aspect That Is Not In Dispute... by mbunkus
Parent article: Moving some of Python to GitHub?

> No one prevents you (or any other project hosted on github) from keeping that workflow. Even if someone submits a github-based pull request you can still do all the necessary steps without github (add the remote, pull, compare diffs/view logs, merge, push). Here github doesn't replace existing functionality but extends it.

No, but it's an impediment to me as an ad-hoc contributor to *other people's* projects.

With an email-based workflow, I can clone a repository, patch it, then git-send-email to the appropriate mailing list. In most cases, I don't even need to be subscribed to that list.

With a GitHub pull-request-based workflow I need a GitHub account (I've been resisting getting one for myself), I need to make sure I explicitly "fork" the repository within GitHub (simply pushing my copy of the repo to my account won't make pull requests work, as far as I know, because GitHub doesn't know that the original project and my project are "linked"), and I need to use the GitHub web interface to actually generate the pull request and take part in its review. If all of this isn't vendor lock-in, I don't know what is.

I've got bigger problems with the GitHub pull request workflow anyway. If you generate a pull request, discover that changes need to be made, you have two choices: you can create a new pull request, losing all comments from the previous one, or you have to add new commits. If you drop the to-be-pulled branch from your repository and replace it with a different branch with the same name, the pull request loses all of its comments.

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So The One Aspect That Is Not In Dispute...

Posted Dec 10, 2014 4:09 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> the pull request loses all of its comments.

This seems to have been fixed since you last looked (I remember such behaviors). The old commits are now collapsed as "older diffs" which can be expanded to see the comments. The biggest issue is with deleting entire repos.

So The One Aspect That Is Not In Dispute...

Posted Dec 10, 2014 8:01 UTC (Wed) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link]

> This seems to have been fixed since you last looked (I remember such behaviors). The old commits are now collapsed as "older diffs" which can be expanded to see the comments.

If that's the case, then it certainly has improved!

> The biggest issue is with deleting entire repos.

Yeah, I hit that one too. As I said before, I'm an "ad-hoc contributor" to many projects, which means I am very likely to remove a forked repository as soon as my branch has been merged. At the same time, though, I don't want the comments on the pull request to become lost to future contributors.