I appreciate the effort here, but after learning the workflow and having to get all this set up on a few computers, having to configure git send-mail is honestly just needlessly annoying and absurd. Organizations that insist on using workflows like git send-mail and mailing lists not only drive away a significant number of potential contributors, but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needless…
Email and Git = <3
31–40 of 265 posts
Re: Email and Git = <3
#32I love this. This is how it was done back in the days of usenet. People would email patches to the linux kernel. Hackers, working alone, late at night, strange times, strange places. Cultivating their work and skills and then ... shoot ... sending an email! Their contribution. So cool! Maybe we should go back to this. Get rid of the whole github thing. Every group their own little mailing list. Laboring in private!
Did you contribute to open source in those days? I did a little (KDE patches to mailing lists before I got Subversion access) and: it was _awful_. You think merging/rebasing/resolving conflicts is a pain now? Doing the same thing via email was _so_ much worse. GitHub has made some parts of open source worse (e.g. how easy it is to now open poor issues while ignoring required information compared to Bugzilla) but the…
I’ve never managed to understand how to all those things, always switching between github web UI, github tools, command-line github. Everything was a mess.
Then I left github for sourcehut and managed to read a book about git.
It is still hard but now, everything makes so much sense. When I have a problem, instead of clicking everywhere and blindly copy/pasting results from stackoverflow, I actually think about my problem and what result I want to have.
Yes, the upfront effort is harder. It is like learning Vim or Emacs. It’s hard for the first few days/weeks then you get a lifetime of incredible benefits.
(Bias/context: I’m the author of https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html )
Re: Email and Git = <3
#33Amending commits, while having the advantage of keeping the git tree pristine at every single point, is incredibly uncomfortable for async workflows such as the one suggested, where your review might take hours/days and you want to continue coding in a forked branch. Upstreaming any code review changes becomes a pain as git treats the two branches as completely distinct.
Re: Email and Git = <3
#34Re: Email and Git = <3
#35Re: Email and Git = <3
#36Not related to Git + git-email. I just want to say that I love the way this website is structured. Also, it renders fast.
Why not have all the content on one page?
Re: Email and Git = <3
#37I appreciate the effort here, but after learning the workflow and having to get all this set up on a few computers, having to configure git send-mail is honestly just needlessly annoying and absurd. Organizations that insist on using workflows like git send-mail and mailing lists not only drive away a significant number of potential contributors, but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needless…
Copy the config, or better yet, version control it (or any of the other solutions to this problem).
Re: Email and Git = <3
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
sr.ht does that I don’t find it very user friendly (well, at all), but if you want a git forge that does that, you can use it.
This is my experience as well. I love the hacker culture associated with it and it's very fun to use e.g. Mutt, sr.ht, and git-send-email together, but it's anything but efficient and straightforward. I ultimately moved away from sr.ht for that reason.
But it is not only about efficiency. It is about control and centralisation.
Git-send-mail works everywhere there’s an email. It allows people to use the tool they prefer. It allows them to build custom tools. It doesn’t make people dependent from a forge (you are a simple "git remote set-url" away from using a new forge).
Github forces everybody to use the same graphical interface which requires tons of JS and lot of CPU. Github forces you to accept all their changes. Github forces you to be a slave of Microsoft and contribute all your code to their IA training set. Github forces you to be notificed of stuff you don’t care.
The "Hacker culture" is first and foremost about personal freedom. And if you believe the tool are not efficient, as a true hacker, you will built others (but, spoiler, most of the time, when you become proficient enough to build you own tools, you realize how efficient the existing ones are).
Hacking is like walking. You look at walkers and you think it looks tiring to walk. So you go to the parking lot. You start your car. You go through the gate and give your driver license to the cop controlling you. You then go to the gas station. You pay with you credit card. There’s an accident in front of you, you are stuck in the traffic. You take your Google controlled GPS and ask for another itinerary. You drive. You wait at a red light, looking at your phone. A notification to pay the insurance of the car. Another one to pay for the leasing of the car itself. A light blink on the dashboard: you need to add oil and do the annual checkup of the car. You drive, you are a bit stressed and go too fast. You see a flash. Shit! Will I get a ticket? I was not that fast? You arrive at destination. There’s no room left in the parking. You start to drive around, hoping for a spot. There! You get it. It is bit small. You hope that nobody will scratch your car. For whatever reason, you learned that cars can’t be scratched so you are very careful. You get out of the car and walk a bit to the destination. Then you see them… The walkers. They went here by foot, through a path in the forest. They are smiling, even if they was some light rain.
And you ask them:
"Why don’t you guys get a car? Seriously? Walking is hard and inefficient. I can’t walk myself for than 1km before getting my legs sore."
Re: Email and Git = <3
#39I appreciate the effort here, but after learning the workflow and having to get all this set up on a few computers, having to configure git send-mail is honestly just needlessly annoying and absurd. Organizations that insist on using workflows like git send-mail and mailing lists not only drive away a significant number of potential contributors, but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needless…
Re: Email and Git = <3
#40I wish I could "preview" sending my patch to mailing lists. I've considered the idea of having a localhost mailing list for the sole purpose of sending it there just to make sure that i've got everything setup right, but haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
People generally are helpful if it's your first time contributing, so if someone isn't right, I'm sure someone will help you get it right.