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Why is copying and pasting to be discouraged?

• daleharvey 13y ago
  And why is forking encouraged? its one of my largest pet peeves with github, I cant just clone someones repo, make a patch in a branch and email / send it off, I need to fork the repo and make a pull request. I dont like having to go to the effort and litter my repository list with repos I want to send a couple of line fixes too. * Obviously I can, but its more hassle for the owner and less likely to be accepted
  • grannyg00se 13y ago
    How is cloning a benefit over forking? Either way you end up with the repository littering your list. I suppose if you clone you could immediately delete the clone after submitting the patch, but that seems premature. In both cases, you can delete the repo after the patch is applied, couldn't you?
    • delluminatus 13y ago
      Well, cloning is a git thing, not a github thing. Cloning repositories doesn't put them on your github repository list.
  • aeontech 13y ago
    Well you answered your own question - it's slightly more convenient to you, but less convenient for the repo owner. That said, some projects certainly do all their patch/merge over email since before github existed (like Linux kernel dev) and have no plans to change that. You've probably seen discussion with Linus Torvalds about the problems with "pull request" model for his workflow: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
  • hayksaakian 13y ago
    Forking is a godsend for using patched versions of inactive user's repos. In my case, an owner of a library was inactive. I noticed other users had fixed issues I was having, so I pointed my gem file at their repo temporarily until the owner of the root repo finally got back.