Maybe I missed it, but I think it would be great to also explain what happens on the other end of this process. What does someone do when they receive a patch?
Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#32This is great for small one-off projects, but I don't know why anyone would want to promote the usage of mailing lists in general. The industry moved on to more centralized solutions like github for a reason - mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions. Because old and large projects are using them doesn't mean it's a good reason for new projects to use them today.
If anyone has problems with using closed-source platforms like github, there are open-source alternatives like gogs/gitea so you're fully in charge. Abandoning the openness of such platforms in favor of mailing lists would be a big step backwards.
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#33One thing a lot of email providers (at least gmail and fastmail) do is let you create application passwords that you can use for specific purposes. So if you're at all queasy about having your password in plain text on the hard drive, you can create a special password just for git. Edit: you don't have to set up a terminal email client at this point, but if you figure out how to use git-send-email, you're just inches…
They're getting closer to public-key authentication, I guess that's good.
Ooooooo.
Is there such a thing as SSMTP/SIMAP (i.e. something that is to SMTP/IMAP as SFTP is to FTP - i.e. an SSH-based thing that sends and/or receives mail to/from a mail server)? It'd be badass to be able to literally just use my SSH keys to authenticate when sending/receiving mail.
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#34The page sets a background color, but not text color. With system theme, I get white text on white background.
Looks like it'd be enough to add a "color: black;" right after the "background: white;" on line 13. I'm sure the page author would appreciate you emailing them a patch :)
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#35Maybe I missed it, but I think it would be great to also explain what happens on the other end of this process. What does someone do when they receive a patch?
git apply filename.patch
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#36No JS - I was baffled - did not know about ` ">`. Nice. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/la...
IMHO, the single-most underused HTML attribute. I get annoyed when I have to aim for the tiny box, instead of the nice long string of text next to it. Although, I can't count the number of times I was guilty of omitting it many moons ago.
Isn't it better to nest the checkbox inside the label? Then you don't need the for attribute nor an id.
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're getting closer to public-key authentication, I guess that's good.
Ooooooo. Is there such a thing as SSMTP/SIMAP (i.e. something that is to SMTP/IMAP as SFTP is to FTP - i.e. an SSH-based thing that sends and/or receives mail to/from a mail server)? It'd be badass to be able to literally just use my SSH keys to authenticate when sending/receiving mail.
That does sound perfect. Don't know if it exists.
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#38Can only speak for myself, but I didn't understand enough context to get much out of the site. I'm used git for small, personal collaborations, so I don't know why it sends email or when you would want it to do that. I don't know what a "patch" means here and why you use email with them. If I'm not your target audience, then that's fine, but it might be helpful to have some background on this. Otherwise, the site and…
The idea is that in order for multiple people to collaborate, most of the time you will need a service like Github, Bitbucket or perhaps something you can run yourself. This is a different workflow. Instead of staying in sync via a hosted service, people stay in sync and send 'pull requests' via email.
Thanks, this response starts to remove some of my confusion. So it's git without the server, communicating pushes over email instead. (I guess you automatically pull whatever is in the emails you get?)
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#39This is great for small one-off projects, but I don't know why anyone would want to promote the usage of mailing lists in general. The industry moved on to more centralized solutions like github for a reason - mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions. Because old and large projects are using them doesn't mean it's a good reason for new projects to use them today. If anyone has pr…
> mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions
On the contrary, I largely prefer mailing lists for non-code discussions (i.e. things that are not code review or filing bugs). When Swift's mailing lists moved to Discourse I realized that I stopped interacting with it as much because it was more inconvenient to work with (especially on mobile).
Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git
#40Can only speak for myself, but I didn't understand enough context to get much out of the site. I'm used git for small, personal collaborations, so I don't know why it sends email or when you would want it to do that. I don't know what a "patch" means here and why you use email with them. If I'm not your target audience, then that's fine, but it might be helpful to have some background on this. Otherwise, the site and…
>I'm used git for small, personal collaborations This is a great reason to use email! You don't need a platform at all, you can use the tools presented in this tutorial to email your work directly to your collaborators. Outside of that, email is used for collaboration with many large and important projects, such as Linux, PostgreSQL, and git itself. I have some writings about why I think this workflow is nice: https:…
Thanks for the reply. I'll explain why I'm still confused/unsure what is going on, hope it is useful feedback.
My understanding of git is that there is a server, and users push/pull to the server.
So from an initial look at everything you provided, it sounded to me like git-send-email gives people email notifications to know what has been changed on the server, for example. I don't know what "email-driven workflow" means and that was my best guess.
But from someone else's reply, it sounds like you are discussing an alternative to the server model, where there is no server at all and pushes and pulls are communicated completely via email. This seems consistent with your 2018-07-02 post, but honestly I didn't really get it from there the first time. Is it correct?