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Patches / PR > It’s probably the core reason developers choose GitHub as their main git forge. I get it. It does have it’s advantages of giving a better experi

Patches / PR > It’s probably the core reason developers choose GitHub as their main git forge. I get it. It does have it’s advantages of giving a better experience for reviewing a set of changes. Initially. But what if I told you there was a time when submitting email-based patches was the standard for version control? The author explains well how you can bear with patches, but not why patches were chosen in the first place. What advantages do they have over PR? I see none, and I won't lose my precious time working-around an inferior process to Github's already subpar PR one.

xigoi 6mo ago
Patches allow people to contribute without having an account on the forge.
musicmatze 6mo ago
You did not explain why the patch based process is "inferior", neither did you explain why you'd have to "work around" the process!
- mudkipdev 6mo ago
  Learning git format-patch, send-email, configuring SMTP, setting up wrapping, mailing list etiquette, versioned patch sets...
dapperdrake 6mo ago
Here is what email patches are all about: https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kernel.html https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kerne... I tried email patches with another person myself. The only reason GH won here, is because the git people made one fatal mistake: They forgot to include the tree hash and only show the commit hash in the email patch. But the commit hash is useless. When you email patch, then commits people want to treat as "the same" and talk about have different hashes. The commit times differ and there is not only the commit author, but also the committer. We stopped doing email patches, because commit hashes became useless for communicating with each other. GitHub made commit hashes "constant" in a way people care about. For our purposes, tree hashes would have been much better in practice. The git user interface is literally "git porcelain". It cuts you for no reason.
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  That's not the only problem with git send-email by a long way. Even the setup process is extremely painful.
steeleduncan 6mo ago
I think there is a strong argument that Gerrit is the current evolution of the patches workflow, many prefer it, and there are a lot of good blog posts explaining why. I don't know what the justification for emailing patches around is though, that seems needlessly painful in the face of alternatives
mcc1ane 6mo ago
I believe I've read something by Drew DeVault about it, but I can't find it. The closest I found is this - https://drewdevault.com/blog/Code-review-with-aerc/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Code-review-with-aerc/ - although it has broken links.

xigoi 6mo ago

Patches allow people to contribute without having an account on the forge.

musicmatze 6mo ago

You did not explain why the patch based process is "inferior", neither did you explain why you'd have to "work around" the process!

mudkipdev 6mo ago
Learning git format-patch, send-email, configuring SMTP, setting up wrapping, mailing list etiquette, versioned patch sets...

dapperdrake 6mo ago

Here is what email patches are all about: https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kernel.html https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kerne... I tried email patches with another person myself. The only reason GH won here, is because the git people made one fatal mistake: They forgot to include the tree hash and only show the commit hash in the email patch. But the commit hash is useless. When you email patch, then commits people want to treat as "the same" and talk about have different hashes. The commit times differ and there is not only the commit author, but also the committer. We stopped doing email patches, because commit hashes became useless for communicating with each other. GitHub made commit hashes "constant" in a way people care about. For our purposes, tree hashes would have been much better in practice. The git user interface is literally "git porcelain". It cuts you for no reason.

IshKebab 6mo ago
That's not the only problem with git send-email by a long way. Even the setup process is extremely painful.

steeleduncan 6mo ago

I think there is a strong argument that Gerrit is the current evolution of the patches workflow, many prefer it, and there are a lot of good blog posts explaining why. I don't know what the justification for emailing patches around is though, that seems needlessly painful in the face of alternatives

mcc1ane 6mo ago

I believe I've read something by Drew DeVault about it, but I can't find it. The closest I found is this - https://drewdevault.com/blog/Code-review-with-aerc/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Code-review-with-aerc/ - although it has broken links.