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Comment by carussell | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what you're referring to. Not quite as laborious as what? When I mentioned things like "setting up a remote", I was specifically thinking of GitHub and GitLab's web forms. It's as exactly as involved as I outlined above.

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It's really not that hard: https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-fro...

GitHub also lets new contributors edit in upstream repositories - and then coordinates a new fork, branch, and PR for the change when the user clicks "Save".

I don't understand how this is a response to anything I wrote in my first comment, or the followup that you're directly responding to. Once again, pull requests work exactly as I outlined above.

No one is disagreeing that this is the technical process behind creating a pull request. It just turns out that a number of companies including Github and GitLab are willing to do all of these steps with a few button presses for free for anyone on behalf of any open source project.

I've long felt I was missing something about the github process. It seems insanely complicated to me. Pushing the fork button is a very small piece of the process. Setting up remotes and things is very much NOT button- automated. And at the end of the process, you have this extra repo lying around in your github account that you'll probably never use again. The effort and amount of artifacts generated by a simple change are way out of proportion.

And yes, I do appreciate the rare cases when I can just make the change in the web interface of the original project. But most one-time changes I make involve compiling (or at least running) something.

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