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Comment by humanistbot | Hacker News Reader

> Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them commit access.

This is not a "hack", this is precisely how free and open source software projects have operated since before GitHub existed. It is sad how much of that culture has been lost and is reinventing the wheel.

The more radical version is that you automatically merge every PR that passes the tests and give the committer commit access. But it seems strange to see the default social practice of giving commit access to those who make decent PRs described as a "hack."

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Um, how exactly do you mean that? The pre-GitHub equivalent would be giving people commit access to the CVS/Subversion repository. This generally did not happen lightly either in most projects.

> The pre-GitHub equivalent would be giving people commit access to the CVS/Subversion repository.

Correct.

> This generally did not happen lightly either in most projects.

Maybe not for the super big or central projects. But for most in that long tail, that's been my experience, at least in Debian. For a long time, there have been tons of orphaned projects or projects actively looking for new maintainers.

I can't agree from my own memory of the time. From how jealously most projects guarded commit access to CVS, you'd think the commit bit was a key to their personal homes and an invitation to sleep with their wives. Many (most?) "open source" projects in the early days had a private CVS that outsiders couldn't even read; the original model everyone followed was just source code dumps on FTP alongside binary releases. Maybe we're talking about different time periods.

> Maybe we're talking about different time periods.

Perhaps, or different ecosystems. Most of my experience is in Debian.

I think the “hack” language is correct because it’s a rethinking of GitHub at some level.

More importantly though I think you’re missing something very big about open source projects — the transition from “small project with single maintainer” to “group ownership” has always been a difficult one; that’s not unique to GitHub.

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