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I consider myself a git novice, so please explain if I am wrong. But isn't a Pull Request basically: "I cloned your project and made a bunch of new commits, please pull from [url to repo with .git folder in it] to merge those changes in to your project"?

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Contributing by patches is even simpler, since you don't even need a place to host your repo. Instead you literally do "git format-patch some_base_ref" and get a bunch of files you mail someone.

It doesn't get any simpler...

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Most Web UIs that implement pull requests though only support Pull Requests between repositories hosted on their platform. You can't just provide a url to an arbitrary git repo to pull from. In principle though, there's no reason they _couldn't_ implement a feature which would allow that.

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