Perhaps the nomenclature of "protocol specification" is ambiguous as it seems you're referring to wire protocols. I was thinking more along the idea of definin

Perhaps the nomenclature of "protocol specification" is ambiguous as it seems you're referring to wire protocols. I was thinking more along the idea of defining contracts for "What are the required data attributes for a merge?" or "What are the required attributes -- both in terms of defining the changeset and the user info for the user proposing the PR -- for a pull request?" The reference to "Making Linus happy" is from an interview where he explained that he won't take kernel PRs via GitHub because the user info metadata is different. I don't see why this cannot all be standardized and the various communities can write contract-compliant servers and clients for an agreed-upon distributed version control system.