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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

Gitea (and a few others) are working on federation for pull requests, which would allow someone to fork your project to their own server, and send a pull request offering you to merge from their server into yours.

It also builds on top of ActivityPub which is supposed to allow federation with the greater ActivityPub ecosystem ("fediverse"). I guess this would allow people to like or comment your issue or pull request from Mastodon and those other platforms.

I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature and a necessary step for a chance to topple GitHub. If hosting my own forge means I have to either get patches over email or let people register so they can create their own fork here, it's a non-starter for many.

edit: here is Gitea's issue: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/18240

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> I am not that excited about that last part, but federating pull requests sounds like a killer feature

Git already has a pull request feature [1] that's as federated as it can get. The 'request-pull' command can be used to request pull on upstream repositories hosted anywhere (or not at all). The only requirement is that the downstream clone must be online. I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based workflows for git. But requesting a pull is as simple as copying the output and mailing it (or via any text messaging service) to the maintainer. And doing a pull as a maintainer is actually easier than doing local PR merges using Github.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

> I know that HN isn't particularly found of email-based workflows for git.

I would think it's not just HN. Do you think people are using github PR feature because they just don't know about the email-based workflow available, but would prefer it if they did? Most people don't want an email-based workflow here.

> But requesting a pull is as simple as copying the output and mailing it (or via any text messaging service) to the maintainer.

I love email based workflows as much as anyone but for many people this is not "simple". For one, you need to be able to send plain text email or at least not have your client mangle it too much.

I can see this being difficult for random people, but I can't imagine it being a hard ask for developers.

A pull request on a Git hosting platform is much more though. It allows commenting, tracking versions of the branch, and showing the diff. Even if the pull request is denied, those comments and the diff will stay available for all to see.

You can replicate that with email with a patch-based workflow, if you have a mailing-list server with public archives. That is not that much less software, and you have to deal with email deliverability etc.

Simply sending someone a git-request-pull doesn't carry anything for posterity. It contains a link to some place that hopefully contains the changes at one point (if you typed it right, git does no validation), but probably won't contain them for long.

Hot damn, that sounds awesome. Easy PRs would be a huge step to getting me off GitHub.

Why is gitea hosted on GitHub? That seems ironic.

Gitea and Gogs weren't originally meant to be replacements for Github. They were meant for self-hosted internal repositories. That's why they are still on Github, even though hosts like Codeberg use them for public hosting these days.

It's getting close to be hosted by gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

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