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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

It's so trivial to cherry-pick or rebase and merge such a commit if you understand enough of git to use it properly with branches and stuff. If the commit message is suitably worded it saves time too.

There are software projects out there, even highly used ones, that only use Github to mirror their SVN repository (or some other yesteryear source code system). For those maintainers these PRs do take up more time than they contribute though.

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If they don't want GitHub PRs, they can just disable them.

GitHub doesn't allow you to disable pull requests, despite many project (including notable ones like Linux) asking them to add this feature.

They offer 3 options for doing so, in fact, in direct response to this controversy.

I can limit interactions to non-new users.

I can limit interactions to users that have contributed before.

I can limit interactions to users that I have manually whitelisted in my repo.

Unfortunately, only one of these can be active at a time, but the options do exist now.

Go to your repo -> Settings -> Moderation Settings -> Interaction Limits

Limiting interactions is not the same as disabling pull requests wholesale (you can disable issues completely), they are temporary in nature (you can only disable them for 6 months at a time), and in addition I believe my comment was posted before they announced the new feature -- and this is a feature people have been requesting for a decade now.

Thankfully, they've gone and made it opt-in from now on.

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