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Git without a forge

chiark.greenend.org.uk

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Re: Git without a forge

#131

Post by stopthe »

jeroenhd wrote: post #98
Brian_K_White wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted at least one patch to putty some time ago and it was such a nothingburger I don't even remember what it took. Somehow it neither baffled nor infuriated nor even annoyed me a little. All these complaints and critiques sound like so much baby crying over nothing to me.

Same with the account creation on normal git websites. You fill out three fields and click a link in your email, it's no more complex than git send-email. I'm sure I can figure out the archaic git email system, how hard can it possibly be? Same with the git bundle thing, this is the first time I've read about it but it seems usable. I don't expect anyone I'll ever directly work with to know what the hell a bundle fil…

That filter may be the advantage, but Mr. Tatham is just too polite to say that aloud.

Re: Git without a forge

#134

Post by TiredOfLife »

ackyshake wrote: post #87

> A particular thing I don’t like about git forge websites is the way they make you create an account. Exactly. I used to have a GitHub account but as soon as it got bought out by Microsoft, I was gone. I still refuse to create an account, even though there have been bugs I wanted to report or patches I wanted to contribute. Maybe some maintainers still have email addresses on their profile, many don't. Even if they…

How are you posting on HN without an account?

Re: Git without a forge

#135

Post by cxr »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #134
ackyshake wrote: post #87

> A particular thing I don’t like about git forge websites is the way they make you create an account. Exactly. I used to have a GitHub account but as soon as it got bought out by Microsoft, I was gone. I still refuse to create an account, even though there have been bugs I wanted to report or patches I wanted to contribute. Maybe some maintainers still have email addresses on their profile, many don't. Even if they…

How are you posting on HN without an account?

Bad comparison. People who are critical of others' complaints about creating and/or logging in to a GitHub account like this aren't going through the trouble of creating a GitHub account in 2025 (as opposed to, say, 2015) and are clearly logging in once and staying logged in.

I encourage you to try an experiment where you pick three or four (or more) times a day to log out of your HN account and only log back in the next time you need to perform some action that requires an account/authorization. Now do the same with GitHub and compare the experience. They've made merely logging in such a massive pain in the ass that somehow goes beyond the anticipated pain around "here's a forced 2FA workflow you didn't ask for but have to run through, anyway". All so you can be generous with your time to someone else's benefit and e.g. leave a signpost comment with answers to a shared problem in some neglected bugtracker, but it's real a kicker when this is interrupting a semi-flow state.

Re: Git without a forge

#136

Post by specialist »

sneak wrote: post #38
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

This reminds me of Drew DeVault's advocacy for the traditional email-driven git workflow. [0][1] (Drew is the creator of SourceHut, an email-oriented git forge.) I think his (Simon's) objection to git send-email emails could be addressed with better tooling, or better use of them. It's 'just' a matter of exporting the emails into a single mailbox file, right? (I'm not experienced with git's email-driven features.) It…

Email, like nntp and gopher, lost to the web. People won’t use it if it ain’t on the web. If you force them to use it anyway, very few people will use it. DdV’s advocacy stems from the fact that he is a lone-wolf dev, building tooling for other lone-wolf devs. The social and collaborative features sucking is a feature, not a bug. It falls flat on its face for larger projects and communities.

Noob questions:

PRs are public and email patches are receiver's inbox only, right?

When I'm assessing the merit of any given project, I'd want see if there's a backlog of PRs, right?

Do projects using email-patch workflows set up listservs for receiving patches?

Re: Git without a forge

#137

Post by imiric »

bjackman wrote: post #111
karel-3d wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other guy got downvoted, but... isn't there really some tooling to help with this? Some standardized way of actually sending/reviewing the e-mails? sourcehut has some GUI around it (that I never actually used). I heard that there is some local terminal thing around the e-mail git flow...? One thing I like - in theory - is how decentralized/federated it all is. E-mail is the original decentralization/federation! B…

No there are no standardised tools. There is Patchwork which can help with managing the review workload and can also provide some CI feedback, some subsystems use that with some succcess, other's don't. It's not really something an individual can adopt so if you're working in an area that doesn't use it you're out of luck. There is also Patchew which I've never tried. But overall everyone just has their own individua…

> No there are no standardised tools.

Why would you expect there to be a standardised set of tools used by the largest distributed project in the world? Do you think that this would be possible to enforce globally in a way that makes everyone happier to contribute?

You mentioned two tools that are used by some subsystems. b4[1] is another one, and more are listed here[2]. So there _is_ tooling around it that works for many people. It's just not your preferred choice of tooling, which is... fine.

The fact that email is the lowest common denominator seems like a good thing to me. It allows everyone to use their tools of choice. As long as you can send and receive email, you can contribute. How you decide to integrate that into your development process is up to you. If you can't be bothered to setup a workflow from scratch, then you can adopt someone else's. I'd much rather have this choice, than be forced to use Gerrit or GitHub or whatever else.

[1]: https://b4.docs.kernel.org/

[2]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.14-rc4/dev-tools/index.ht...

Re: Git without a forge

#138

Post by mcherm »

immibis wrote: post #129
mcherm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious -- what is your concern about creating an account? Is it security? Privacy? The need to keep track of it?

My GitHub account is blocked because I refuse to give them my phone number or install their app. They refused a GDPR deletion request too.

OK, that's a really solid reason. Thank you! For me, it suggests that someone like you might not mind creating an account on a system I run (because I allow anonymous account creation without anything at all although providing an email is encouraged).

Re: Git without a forge

#139

Post by KomoD »

cxr wrote: post #135
TiredOfLife wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you posting on HN without an account?

Bad comparison. People who are critical of others' complaints about creating and/or logging in to a GitHub account like this aren't going through the trouble of creating a GitHub account in 2025 (as opposed to, say, 2015) and are clearly logging in once and staying logged in. I encourage you to try an experiment where you pick three or four (or more) times a day to log out of your HN account and only log back in the…

> Now do the same with GitHub and compare the experience. They've made merely logging in such a massive pain in the ass that somehow goes beyond the anticipated pain around "here's a forced 2FA workflow you didn't ask for but have to run through, anyway".

I don't agree, in my opinion it's easier than logging into HN because Github has passwordless auth with passkeys.

I don't even have to enter a username, I just click "Sign in with a passkey" and use my passkey and then I'm logged in, no "forced 2FA workflow"

Re: Git without a forge

#140

Post by IshKebab »

q0uaur wrote: post #41
IshKebab wrote: post #6

> Sometimes people just can’t work out how to send me patches at all. Yeah indeed. I have written but not submitted patches to a project (OpenSBI) because it made the submission process super complicated, requiring signing up to a mailing list, learning how to set up git send-email. I don't see how he can think creating a GitHub account (which almost everyone already has) is a big barrier when he freely admits his pr…

Back when i checked out sr.ht, i really liked the idea of git-send-email precisely because it doesn't require making an account for everything. there's a nice tutorial for how to set it up: https://git-send-email.io/#step-1 worked easily enough for me, i could see myself using it for small patches here and there. I did end up installing forgejo in my homelab after all, but back then it sounded like federation was muc…

> there's a nice tutorial for how to set it up

A simple 12 step process...

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