Email and Git = <3
git-send-email.io
git-send-email.io
Organizations that insist on using workflows like git send-mail and mailing lists not only drive away a significant number of potential contributors, but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needlessly painful process and is incapable of improvement
And using it for a project that accepts this workflow is such a joy, no need to figure out weird merge request that make me re-enter all the information I had in my git commits already.
If it's only a few patches, say three, I can do a simple `git send-email --to mailing@list.example.com -3`, maybe throw in `--cover-letter` for some meta info if the changes are even big enough to require that, and be done.
Certainly to each their own workflow, and once can get accustomed to a lot of needless tasks and workflows, but how one can look at the bloated interfaces that try hard to add vendor-lock-in and say "this is so much simpler and easier to grasp" can IMO only mean they never tried this way in good faith. In the end sending a mail is trivial, and code changes are text (most of the time), it can hardly be beat in simplicity.
Anecdotally, most of our new hires from the last years had no experience with the email workflow, and a few weeks in most of them find it way better, while the rest finds it at least as good as the alternatives (and here they mean gitea or sourcehut, not the monsters that GitHub/Lab are).
You forgot that mailing list requires subscription and in some cases it could be a tricky. Without proper subscriptions and confirming subscription, your mails with patches will go to trash.
I'm asking specifically what part of subscribing to mailing lists is the tricky part, as that's what parent mentioned. I'm not saying it's easier/harder than GitHub's workflow.
Configuring git send-email is only half the battle, anyway - chances are you want to participate in the discussion of your patch, so better figure out how to make sure your email client will not send the forbidden HTML email.
This sounds like hyperbolic brought on by dislike, not a real indicator of time cost/effort. You've already spent more time complaining, than the work done to do these things!
No subscribing needed. Standard policy on all mailing lists is to reply-to-all so you'll get always CC'ed on replies. This also makes it very easy to pull in more people into a discussion, even across different projects.
Many mailing lists today reject posts from non-subscribers.
Of those that allow posts from non-subscribers, you will find that many are configured such that you will not get a reply, due to "reply-to munging". Your message will go to the list, but with a Reply-to: header designating that list, instead of (or in addition to) setting the more modern mailing-list-related headers.
Reply-to-all isn't a list policy; it's a behavior of the individuals. Some people don't reply to all. They think they are, but only the post author gets their reply. That is one of the motivations behind the Reply-to.
https://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-still-harmful.htm...
You mean cloning a repo and then simply pushing upstream?
I can’t fathom how anyone would think that is more complicated than e-mail push workflows.
It’s like someone telling you that IRC is “obviously” less complicated than setting up a Discord account.
People in this thread are talking past each other without realizing that they are expressing different preferences about where complexity belongs in a tool.
(For the record, I happen to be on the IRC / git mailing list side of the spectrum.)
I'm trying to subscribe to Discord. I'm currently stuck in a captcha loop.
Clicking a link to open a chatroom directly, with no account creation process, is infinitely simpler than account creation, potentially with several layers of verification (CAPTCHA, email, phone verification to join a server...).
- cloning the repo in github to your own fork
- cloning your fork locally
- pushing to your local fork after you've made your change
- opening a PR
Which is the expected flow for any project you're not already part of, ie all of them.
The email workflow:
- send an email
I can't fathom how you can say the email workflow is more complicated.
Avoiding email based workflows and alerting is one of my top priority in every job I have had.
The linked article is literally a multi-step process of arcane terminal commands that differ by operating system. You may think it's easy, but it's definitionally not trivial.
sudo -H cpan Net::SMTP::SSL IO::Socket::SSLLike a mail server?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here but it sounds more like an irrational hatred of email than something genuinely technical to me.
srht is really designed for (and thus only really useful for) lone wolf developers who collaborate rarely, if ever, and with a very small number of collaborators who collaborate infrequently. It is not built for large teams with constant active collaboration, it falls down for this use case.
It’s hobby software for hobby users. (I don’t think this is a bad thing, but you should be aware of the product design goals of its author.)
This is wrong.
This is exactly the problematic attitude. I'm an OpenJDK author but not linux kernel contributor for mainly this reason. There are many people like me.
> majority of contributors to Linux, an extremely successful free software project, prefer the email-based workflow
This reminds me the many absurd conversations I had from my time in Goldman Sachs, few years ago. People with 15+ year tenures claiming Slang is the best answer to any- and everything. They just didn't know any better and stubbornly stuck to tooling and mindset straight out of 1995.
The internal cloud was just getting up to speed when I left, and that was more modern and also a joy to use.
There's a lot to dislike about working there, but in my experience, the firmwide tooling was excellent.
Windows and Office and AWS and GCP dwarf these foss projects.
There is a reason that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple don’t use email to collaborate on software.
You cannot possibly claim that the other side needs to cite their sources and then throw numbers like that out without any backing.
I say that as someone who don’t like GitHub, but overall it’s far from the worst tool an employer may impose to its employees.
Fake Edit: Oh this is HN. Never mind then.
I funnily think that many of the people poo-pooing the email patch method here, would just as merrily join in on HN were it an email mailing list collection, haha! :)
It is often used in GitHub CI workflows.
Basically, everyone agreed that actually doing the review on gitlab was a lot worse compared to email. There's just so much more flexibility.
It's not off the table that we may give it a try again, because the advantages of having concrete pull requests (and issues and...) rather than patch series is pretty significant. But if you're familiar with doing email-based review, I think it's still a far superior; and you're definitely giving something up when you move away from it.
Could you elaborate? This is truly shocking to me. Admittedly I have never worked on a project with an email-based workflow, but I can't think of how email would allow comments inline with the patch, which is an incredibly beneficial feature to me.
You always reply with quotes; and you always reply inline, below the thing you're replying to. Quoted material is typically indicated by '>'.
So for one thing, you can easily trim your reply to just the bits of the patch that you think is important; that makes it easy for anyone reading; you don't have to skip over large parts of the thread.
Then you can also re-arrange what you're replying to, to make it make your reply make more sense.
Furthermore, suppose A replies to the patch and makes comments 1, 2, and 3 (inline in a single email). When person B replies to A's email, they typically also send a single email, perhaps with replies 1' and 3' (trimming out comment 2, which they don't care about). This means if you've read A's mail, you can just read B's mail, and all the "new" comments are collected in one place (with the thing they're replying to).
Contrast the above with gitlab, where A's replies 1, 2, and 3 are spread throughout the patch; and B's replies will also be spread out, meaning you have a kind of discoverability problem to see both 1' and 3'.
And suppose in the course of talking about something you realize this bug may actually be a security issue -- you can remove the list, cc' "security@", and pick up the discussion without having to do any copy & paste. Same goes if you want to make a private comment, or bring something to someone's attention; just reply, remove everyone else, and say "FYI".
I wish I had a really good recent example to show you, but a quick skim of today's threads isn't anything special. :-)
I mean, I was arguing with people online [1] on BBS's in the early 90's, and I was on Usenet back when that was the main social network; so this "reply and comment inline" way of having a discussion is pretty well ingrained for me. But there are people on my team in their early 30's who also took to the email workflow really quickly too.
For another, it's not common to see more than 2 levels of `>` (your text, the thing you're replying to, and the thing they're replying to); and yes, when it gets past 4 it begins to get really unreadable, so my gut feel is that it's extremely rare (although I wouldn't be certain without doing some sort of data mining).
As I said, the main advantage of using email is the flexibility you have in editing the response; part of learning how to use the review workflow effectively is learning how to present the context; which means trimming the replies to balance information and readability.
That being said, there is certainly room for improvement.
The example that springs to mind is spamgourmet, which has a FAQ about why they don't redesign their site. I've used the service for about 20 years, and while there is a bit of a gatekeeping vibe to it, there is also a good reason: they have very few resources for support, and want to attract a certain crowd to minimize the support burden. It seems it's been working for a couple of decades, at least.
> Q. Couldn't you make the whole thing a lot easier to understand by redesigning your site and providing instructions in a more clear way?
> A. Probably. Frankly, we're trying to build a user base of people like you, who probably have some familiarity with the way email works and who are willing to read FAQ's. This is to keep our support burden to a minimum (this is a non-commercial service). So far, the approach has worked well -- just about all our users hit the ground running with no need for support, and it's our belief that those users who would require support generally don't sign up in the first place, perhaps because of the geeky presentation of the site. That's not to say we don't provide support where it's needed -- after skimming this FAQ, please don't hesitate to write if you have a question or believe there's a bug.
https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html
I tend to actively seek out projects like this, since I don't mind the blow to usability, and very much appreciate that they provide the service and don't pepper me with annoucements about their new improvements or their changes to their pricing structure.
Edit: Btw, yes I have done the periodically-check-archive thing in the past, thank you. Hated it. Also missed a response once because I forgot to check and replier didn't CC. I realized like a month later.
It's also not the default in many clients. It's tedious and error-prone.
"Want to contribute ? Give Microsoft even more power" Nope
# do your code change
git commit
git send-email --to=<some mailing list> -1
# amend your change
git commit --amend
git send-email -v2 --to=<some mailing list> -1
Edit with minimal configuration:
cat ~/.gitconfig
[user]
email = your@mail.address
name = Your Name
[sendemail]
smtpuser = your@mail.address
smtpserver = smtp.whatever.com
smtpserverport = 587
smtpencryption = tlshttps://git-send-email.io/#step-2
A tool from Google is mentioned and linked to:
https://github.com/google/gmail-oauth2-tools/tree/master/go/...
cat .gitconfig
# snip
[sendemail]
to = default@list.example.com
annotate = yes
suppresscc = self
smtpencryption=tls
smtpserver=imap.example.com
smtpserverport=587
smtpuser=foo.bar@example.com
And that has to be done once, iow., in essence it's as hard a setting up an email fat client like thunderbird.
Now, knowing the HN crowd this comment will become grey in 3... 2... 1...
Oh, sorry, you actually need to figure out the maintainers, so you can send it directly to them too to get it reviewed faster, so yeah a call to `./scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f <files>` ok, now it got impossible for the modern dev – cannot expect those are able to actually understand basic systems.
Then reply to the review replies you get, if there's still anything to change, how would gerrit making that easier in any way?
I understand not changing for change sake. The kernel is at this time not "this gen" developer friendly.
Yes, most contributors will prefer opening a PR on GitHub as apposed to mailinglists. But imagine instead that you are David Miller, and it's your job to consume the absolute fire hose of patches and messages related to Linux's networking subsystem. Would you rather wade through the hundreds of messages and patches coming in every day using either GitHub PRs and issues or email?
I would choose email for one simple reason: It's easier to script.
Even as a small-time contributor and observer to that space, I couldn't even imagine trying to keep up with everything going on if I couldn't bulk download, filter, tag etc. As a maintainer it would be excruciating.
If your on-disk format is an Mbox or a Maildir, you can use tools like notmuch and its emacs integration to do it.
Now don't get me wrong; I love GitHub. I host all my projects there, and I prefer PRs+issues to mailinglists in almost all cases. But for massive projects like Linux, a mailinglist (and associated tooling) scales better, in my opinion.
Email is just email. You write SMTP/IMAP clients today and they'll continue to work for a long time, probably longer than most platforms with APIs online today.
A GitHub PR is way more steps than e-mailing a patch to a mailing list, and far less accessible. Have you never done the "sign the contributor license agreement and get the GitHub bot to approve it" polka? I've done it a dozen times now, it's painful and way more gatekeepery than just emailing a patch.
> but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needlessly painful process and is incapable of improvement
Who hurt you?
It drives away the kind of people who have little patience for technology problems and little patience for learning new things.
I don't want those kind of people working on e.g. Git. Git needs people who have lots of patience for technology problems and lots of patience for learning new things.
like learning to use a GUI and a Web Interface?
We've seen Web interfaces, they're hard to avoid. We've just decided that they're worse.
> the kind of people who have little patience for technology problems and little patience for learning new things
Also tell me how is tolerating rude incumbents of mailing list sending email with 50+ characters in a line a technical problem? (Yes they are often rude, and unwelcoming to those attempting to accept their anachronistic ways. You are demonstrating that specific behaviour right here, which many of us have encountered on those projects.)
I think the projects which accept contributions only from mailing lists will have their contributors die out, or will be forced to change their ways to survive. I for one will never again attempt to contribute to such project, thanks to the inflexibility of the incumbents I have faced several times. Also thanks to the sub-par review workflow, usually the lacking quick CI feedback.
Web UI might give you RSI, but the insufferable email-only-patches people give me PTSD from my previous encounters.
ps: if you are willing to learn new things, you can automate web apps and GUI apps (eg. Autoit, xaut). Some even have proper APIs (COM/dbus/web api), or a cli!
>> the kind of people who have little patience for technology problems and little patience for learning new things
No, I haven't.
You're making an awful lot of shit up about me. All I said is that I've tried the Web UI:s and didn't particularly like them. Speaking of rude.
There’s having patience and problem-solving ability, and there’s not seeing the value in jumping through the various hoops that comprise some ‘90s Internet fetishist’s playground.
This is all just code for “I’m old, set in my ways, and don’t appreciate the fact that the only reason I find my workflow easier is because I know it, not because it’s more intuitive than what people are doing these days”.
You've spawned a huge thread of people being incredibly self-righteous about the mind-boggling difficulty of sending email. It makes me think that it's actually a great filter to keep out people who prefer drama to clicking a few buttons that are different than the buttons they're used to clicking.
I understand that familiarity is a powerful driving force in human psychology, but really, it's not like it's that hard to learn a different flow. I mean, I've had to use Perforce, and while it's fun to complain, it really wasn't that hard. I didn't even have to get out of my chair.
Often that's a bonus if not the whole point to begin with. The higher the barrier to entry the less noise you need to filter through.
It only feels annoying to you because you're not used to it.
Copy the config, or better yet, version control it (or any of the other solutions to this problem).
^1
https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/#Y29tYmluZSQkbWF...
1. Email has clients with full offline support. Sometimes I work in locations where internet is bad to nonexistent and with github I am limited in what I can do.
2. Anyone can contribute to my repos without needing to sign up to my website. Git with email truly allows decentralization of “forges”. So in the same vain, I can contribute with the same client to any project on the web that accepts email patches and it’s the same workflow for all of them.
3. Since I have an email client for my email, I can set up my own custom workflow that is much faster. Github siloes you into a begrudgingly slow one. My email client integrates into my editor and gives me the same keyboard shortcuts I use to navigate my code.
4. Did I mention it removes centralization? Having github be the center for all repos makes it ripe for enshittification. Given Microsoft’s history for EEE, I don’t trust them one bit.
You could say the same of GitHub. Why do I need an account on your lil site just to get a patch accepted?
The git-send-email part isn't too bad. It's everything else I have a problem with:
- You can't subscribe to a single PR/bug/feature-request thread. Subscription to the mailing list is all-or-nothing. And no, setting up email filters is not a reasonable solution.
- Email clients are pretty much universally terrible. Especially if you want to use the same client for your git flow as you do for regular email. Most clients don't handle inline-replies well, and require some extra work to send plain text emails. Clients that do work well for that often have a steep learning curve, and are missing features if you want to use it for general email.
- The flow for "Dealing with feedback" in this tutorial will start a new email thread instead of replying to the existing one. There is a way to reply to an existing thread with send-email, but it is kind of involved since you have to look up the message id of the email you are replying to (which may or may not be easy depending on your email client). And even then, I've had mixed success with it.
- Although I haven't been on the other side of it, it seems like reviewing the patch would be somewhat difficult without additional tooling. Especially comparing new versions dealing with feedback to the original version.
- Again, I haven't been on that side of it, but it seems like applying the changes from an email would be a bit of a pain compared to just pressing "merge".
- You can run into issues if your lines of code are more than 78 characters long. I used git-send-email to send in a patch once that had this, but the email client of the receiver couldn't handle long lines, so I had to resend it with the patch as an attachment.
- Some mailing lists require you to subscribe before you can send a patch. And if the list is pretty active, that can flood your inbox. See my first point.
- etc.
> - You can't subscribe to a single PR/bug/feature-request thread. Subscription to the mailing list is all-or-nothing. And no, setting up email filters is not a reasonable solution.
You can use tools like public-inbox or lei, the former is hosted for bigger projects on https://lore.kernel.org/
If you're interested, see also https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/lore-lei-part-1-getti...
And sure subscribing for a drive by submission is rather overkill, but if one contributes more than a few patches, setting up a filter is to easy with mailing lists that I don't think one can just hand wave that away as an "unreasonable" solution. List have a dedicated List-Id header, so one can easily filter them in a targeted way.
What I want to convey actually is, that yes, there can be improvements made here, but doing so isn't impossible just because the message medium is decentralized mail vs. a centralized HTTP API.
- Email clients are pretty much universally terrible. Especially if you want to use the same client for your git flow as you do for regular email. Most clients don't handle inline-replies well, and require some extra work to send plain text emails. Clients that do work well for that often have a steep learning curve, and are missing features if you want to use it for general email.
Hard disagree on that being the general case. Even getting Thunderbird to send plaintext is simple and only one setting, and there are mailers like aerc [0] or neomutt that are really well suited for an integrated mail + apply + review setup.
But sure, there are some bad apples, especially most web mailer.
[0]: https://aerc-mail.org/ [1]: https://neomutt.org/
> - The flow for "Dealing with feedback" in this tutorial will start a new email thread instead of replying to the existing one.
Yes, for sending a new revision this is highly wanted – please do NOT send new patch revision to the same thread, that just crowds review and adds nothing. Simply add a changelog to the previous revision in the cover-letter and/or in each patch, i.e., after the message, below "--" and before the diff-stat, as there they won't get into git, such changes are meta info relevant for review, not for the git history.
> - Although I haven't been on the other side of it, it seems like reviewing the patch would be somewhat difficult without additional tooling. Especially comparing new versions dealing with feedback to the original version.
I have reviewed lots of patches via mailing list, it's really nice and depending on the patch one can review directly inline or apply (save + `git am`, or directly `git am` depending on your mailer). IMO much higher quality of life than with the classic Git(La|Hu)b forges.
> - Again, I haven't been on that side of it, but it seems like applying the changes from an email would be a bit of a pain compared to just pressing "merge".
No it really isn't, I'm doing that since years a dozen+ time a day, and it is as easy now as it was back then when I started. If I use thunderbird I got my one directory for it, so I just mark all, save and execute `git am ~/t/aaa/*` in the repo. When I use aerc, then it's even simpler, it has built-in helpers for doing this easily.
Here I can manage simple conflicts easily (e.g., using three-way-merge) on GitHub conflicts are a bigger PITA and need lots of manual intervention from me or waiting on the submitter, meh. Also, the interface often loads weirdly, as they manage their own history as a single page app which often gets in a state where button presses won't do much.
> - You can run into issues if your lines of code are more than 78 characters long. I used git-send-email to send in a patch once that had this, but the email client of the receiver couldn't handle long lines, so I had to resend it with the patch as an attachment.
git send-email uses base64 encoding for that, if the mail user agent of your recipient cannot handle that it's like their broswer cannot handle HTTP/1.1, switch that stuff immediately.
> - Some mailing lists require you to subscribe before you can send a patch. And if the list is pretty active, that can flood your inbox. See my first point.
Yeah, sadly sometimes needed for anti-spam measurements, here I agree fully that this isn't ideal, but FWIW, for Git(Hu|La)b I also need to create a account and fork, so it's not exactly zero work there too, but yeah, due to SSO and gaining access to many projects, vs. just one for a subscription that is not really comparable..
> The amount of "gotchas" in this process and the tooling required just to use git + email seems insane to me.
The base system is really, really simple, but there are some common rules/guidelines that just help when working together, and those are required for forge based workflows too (or do you like a single commit touching a dozen completely different, unrelated things, or just no info at all in the commit message, or pull request, for why a change was done).
The core thing from this workflow is using `git send-email --to=mailing@list.example.com <commit-revision>`, the rest are a few details, possible slightly intimidating if viewed from a distant, but each separate and easy to master/implement on it's own – and most are a "set up once, be done thing", so not constant work.
> If it works for you, great, but I don't expect a new hire (experienced or not) to pickup this flow and run with it.
As mentioned in another comment: We hired over 15 people in the last year, most of them had no experience with git send-email and mailing list development, but they all accustomed fast and after a few weeks most of them stated they find it nicer (as in simpler, less clutter quicker to do submit own work or review others) - I myself started out over eight years ago at this place, i.e., without much experience in mail based development, and I never ran into bigger problems – on the contrary, this workflow felt like a breadth of fresh air compared to what was I used before (mostly GitHub and GitLab).
Note: this works not only for small to medium, but also is the only way that actually works for the biggest projects in the world (e.g., Linux or QEMU).
Just to be sure: I do not say mail(ing list) based development workflow is Just Perfect™, it sure has its problems and can be improved, and may we get some good web GUIs that tie a few of the components together, currently I see https://sourcehut.org/ as strong contender here.
And what better system? Git(Hu|La)b et al.? Yeah no, you definitively didn't use either much in a collaborative way to just call them better, besides being centralized locked-in. Or what's actually better there? I'd love to hear actual arguments and experiences from someone collaborating with hundreds of other people on a project on these Labs/Hubs, not some hand waved name-calling that adds exactly nothing.
Maybe I'm missing something, but those seem like they are for searching mailing lists. I'm not sure how they solve the problem of, getting notified for threads I care about, but not for all of the other ones I don't.
> setting up a filter is to easy with mailing lists that I don't think one can just hand wave that away as an "unreasonable" solution.
Ok, so suppose that there is a patch submitted to fix a bug I care about. I don't want to reply, because I don't have any new information to add, but I want to know once the patch is merged. Yes, it is possible to subscribe to the mailing list and create an email filter, assuming that I know enough about SMTP headers, and i am already familiar with and use a powerful mail client, and only use a single client that I have those filters on. Or have a mail service with very powerful filtering functionality (unlikely). But I wouldn't exactly call it easy.
> List have a dedicated List-Id header, so one can easily filter them in a targeted way.
That's useful for putting all emails from a list in a folder, but doesn't help if you are only interested in a small subset of the emails for any given list.
> because the message medium is decentralized mail vs. a centralized HTTP API.
well, my biggest problem is that the granularity of subscription is far too coarse. It doens't really have to do with being centralized or not.
> there are mailers like aerc [0] or neomutt that are really well suited for an integrated mail + apply + review setup
I've tried using aerc and neomutt. I don't doubt that once you have them set up and have learned how to use them, they work well for this flow, but the learning curve is pretty steep. And they don't work as well for some of my non-development email.
> But sure, there are some bad apples, especially most web mailer.
In other words, the most popular email clients.
> please do NOT send new patch revision to the same thread, that just crowds review and adds nothing
So you just lose all the context of the previous review? And you review the whole thing from scratch? As a reviewer my preferred workflow for changes to a patchset is to receive incremental commits that build on the previous changes, then squash them before merging.
> I have reviewed lots of patches via mailing list, it's really nice and depending on the patch one can review directly inline or apply (save + `git am`, or directly `git am` depending on your mailer).
How do you handle commenting on large patches that change many files? I imagine in such cases you would `git am` the changes and view the diff using your git diff tool of choice, file by file. But then if you find something you need to comment on, you would have to go back to the email client, and search through the large amount of text to find the appropriate line to comment on. That seems rather tedious and disruptive to me.
> Here I can manage simple conflicts easily (e.g., using three-way-merge) on GitHub conflicts are a bigger PITA and need lots of manual intervention from me or waiting on the submitter, meh
FWIW when I deal with conflicts in github, I don't use the UI. I pull the branch of the PR, merge or rebase, resolve the conflicts, and then if the submitter allows, push the changes back up to their branch, or make my own branch. Then I wait for CI to finish before merging the changes post-conflict-resolution.
To be fair, I am somewhat biased, since I have a lot more experience with the Github flow than mailing list flows.
But I would also like to learn how the mailing list flow works in practice, in part so that I can contribute to projects that use it. It seems like there must be tooling and practices that I am ignorant of, but websites like the OP usually don't go any deeper than explaining how to use git send-email and telling you to use a better MUA.
Maybe we should go back to this. Get rid of the whole github thing. Every group their own little mailing list. Laboring in private!
You think merging/rebasing/resolving conflicts is a pain now? Doing the same thing via email was _so_ much worse.
GitHub has made some parts of open source worse (e.g. how easy it is to now open poor issues while ignoring required information compared to Bugzilla) but the contribution side is so much nicer now.
(Bias/context: former GitHub employee, former KDE committer, current Homebrew project leader)
And then there’s a philosophical discussion if burning newbie’s time or discouraging them is worth making the old guard’s time more productive- including discouraging interactions entirely.
(This is why for certain projects you can be entirely useful even if you can’t code; just as an intermediary)
I still do not miss the days of doing patch management from my email client :)
Argitrage?
Email is just used to receive the patch, you should use a tool meant for the job to actually do the merge. I realize that is probably not what you meant though. Besides, when email patching first began, the tooling was in its infancy.
However; today tools like the git cli itself, or magit + smerge-mode (my personal preference) are as good as GitHub, if not better. I never actually use GitHub for merging, even when working on projects hosted in GitHub.
I know because I also actually did this.
You still had to do this locally and then turn it into an email and had no real indication whether someone else had seen/tried/reviewed/etc. it
> However; today tools like the git cli itself, or magit + smerge-mode (my personal preference) are as good as GitHub, if not better.
I can totally believe for you: this is the case. For most people, though: it will not be. Feel free to prove me wrong by creating a(nother) project that gets thousands of contributors entirely through email.
(If you're actually Linus Torvalds, though: you win, I'll shut up now)
I’ve never managed to understand how to all those things, always switching between github web UI, github tools, command-line github. Everything was a mess.
Then I left github for sourcehut and managed to read a book about git.
It is still hard but now, everything makes so much sense. When I have a problem, instead of clicking everywhere and blindly copy/pasting results from stackoverflow, I actually think about my problem and what result I want to have.
Yes, the upfront effort is harder. It is like learning Vim or Emacs. It’s hard for the first few days/weeks then you get a lifetime of incredible benefits.
(Bias/context: I’m the author of https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html )
You are now a git user.
Your skepticism is understandable! GH seeks to bring this collab to all, but back then the skill required to even contribute was a barrier. But in a way that barrier was acceptable and useful.
The people doing it were skilled. The basic level of skill required to even contribute was a lot. I think there’s something to that.
As a 14-year-old it was beyond me, or so I thought, but in truth it probably wasn’t. But yep, you got me; I did not contribute! I was an observer, with a genuine admiration for the simplicity and effectiveness of that method of contribution. How sending something as commonplace as an email can have profound implications when it carries a valuable contrib!
Indeed GH has some joy. Yet while convenient, modern tools might lack the intimacy and individualism of the older, more decentralized methods, which can avoid the immediate public scrutiny that GH may entail.
I suppose you can consider my words an ode to the old ways, and an invitation to consider whether some elements of the past should be reintroduced in today's collaborative environs. This might sound whimsical (and perhaps not entirely accurate), but perhaps the "email method" was even more eco-friendly!
It's not so much I think those things you list are a pain, just the overall "structure of collaboration and social organizing algorithms" (please excuse me; I'm finding this hard to articulate!).
If don't get the vibe of my comment, I totally understand! It's intended to resonate with those who witnessed the evolution of dev practices and share my nostalgia for the early internet of the 90s.
My memories of watching patches flying over those email lists are forever tied up with that whole early internet nostalgia. I loved that stuff. I read zines, and printed off RFCs so I could smuggle them to school and read them, just to “stay in touch” with online, even when we couldn’t connect. :)
> As a 14-year-old it was beyond me, or so I thought, but in truth it probably wasn’t.
Eh, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't! I didn't do any meaningful open source contribution until the tail end of university/college.
> I suppose you can consider my words an ode to the old ways, and an invitation to consider whether some elements of the past should be reintroduced in today's collaborative environs.
A great idea and always worth considering <3
Wait, are people doing this via the GitHub web UI these days? That sounds like a nightmare.
I didn't say that, though, so I'm not sure where you're coming from here.
Very poetic, but also not much different to the current state. Just clicking to open a PR instead of sending an email attachment.
I guess I prefer text. And deeply there's a difference between staying in text, and moving to GUI. The medium is the message^0, and even if the process is "the same", everything becomes different because you're no longer within the text world.
More GitLab push options are documented in https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/push_options.html
You can also add a parameter to merge the merge request when the pipeline succeeds. This can be handy for quick fixes that do not require reviews, and avoids unnecessary context switches.
# mwps BRANCHNAME
alias mwps='git push -u origin -o merge_request.create -o merge_request.target=main -o merge_request.merge_when_pipeline_succeeds'
Example from https://gitlab.com/sytses/dotfiles/-/blob/master/git/aliases... and https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/19/top-10-gitlab-hacks...
If you prefer deeper CLI integration, suggest installing the GitLab CLI: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/editor_extensions/gitlab_cli/
I don’t find it very user friendly (well, at all), but if you want a git forge that does that, you can use it.
But it is not only about efficiency. It is about control and centralisation.
Git-send-mail works everywhere there’s an email. It allows people to use the tool they prefer. It allows them to build custom tools. It doesn’t make people dependent from a forge (you are a simple "git remote set-url" away from using a new forge).
Github forces everybody to use the same graphical interface which requires tons of JS and lot of CPU. Github forces you to accept all their changes. Github forces you to be a slave of Microsoft and contribute all your code to their IA training set. Github forces you to be notificed of stuff you don’t care.
The "Hacker culture" is first and foremost about personal freedom. And if you believe the tool are not efficient, as a true hacker, you will built others (but, spoiler, most of the time, when you become proficient enough to build you own tools, you realize how efficient the existing ones are).
Hacking is like walking. You look at walkers and you think it looks tiring to walk. So you go to the parking lot. You start your car. You go through the gate and give your driver license to the cop controlling you. You then go to the gas station. You pay with you credit card. There’s an accident in front of you, you are stuck in the traffic. You take your Google controlled GPS and ask for another itinerary. You drive. You wait at a red light, looking at your phone. A notification to pay the insurance of the car. Another one to pay for the leasing of the car itself. A light blink on the dashboard: you need to add oil and do the annual checkup of the car. You drive, you are a bit stressed and go too fast. You see a flash. Shit! Will I get a ticket? I was not that fast? You arrive at destination. There’s no room left in the parking. You start to drive around, hoping for a spot. There! You get it. It is bit small. You hope that nobody will scratch your car. For whatever reason, you learned that cars can’t be scratched so you are very careful. You get out of the car and walk a bit to the destination. Then you see them… The walkers. They went here by foot, through a path in the forest. They are smiling, even if they was some light rain.
And you ask them:
"Why don’t you guys get a car? Seriously? Walking is hard and inefficient. I can’t walk myself for than 1km before getting my legs sore."
I don't blame anyone for using it either, just didn't fit my personal workflow like mouse-based doesn't fit yours.
But makes sense.
(Git was introduced in 2005, while Linux was first released in 1991; fourteen years separate them.)
Why not have all the content on one page?
Could someone elaborate on this? Obviously it’s not intended, but is there anything wrong, from a technical standpoint, with using `git format-patch`, zipping the result, attaching it to an email using a GUI email client, and sending it to a maintainer who unzips and runs `git am`?
git send-email is made for this, and handles all edge cases correctly, but depending on your MUA and/or it's config, it can work pasting patch diffs in there just fine – the point is that, especially for newcomers, and for a few edge cases, it may hard to do correctly and so using the tool made for the job avoids friction for all sites.
ps. ZIP wouldn't be required, just use base64 encoding, that's basically what git send-email does, depending on the encoding, line length, ... of a commit.
Re sending patches in email clients without using send-email, some clients (famously Outlook) try to be "helpful" and for example remove blank lines (double or single, don't remember) for example and will corrupt the patch in the process.
In any case, even the possibility of such an outcome is not pleasant.
Personally, though, when I have to actually cut something, I use stainless steel knives or scissors, which are cheap and readily available and do a much better job. Same with pull requests. But historical reenactment can be a fun pastime.
And that having been said, I really GitHub/GitLab/etc. could move on from the pull request model and into a more change-oriented model like Gerrit or Phabricator. These are clearly better models in my opinion, and for most uses it's not even dramatically different.
git send-email --dry-run <commitish>
git format-patch -o<tempdir> <committish>
git format-patch --stdout <committish> > foo.mbox
People generally are helpful if it's your first time contributing, so if someone isn't right, I'm sure someone will help you get it right.
Can somebody elaborate?
>Be advised that Protonmail is generally known to be a pretty bad email host. [...] Not to mention their mistreatment of open source and false promises of security! You should consider a different mail provider.
Actually, if you want to cut out all the systems like github or git lab, why wouldn't the team just set up a VPS with standard ssh access and that would be the main repo people push to since git supports many protocols like ssh, and even file:// (which I use for my local projects which are backed up).
It's easy for the VPS admin to add new team members, just a standard Linux account. It might be possible to even set up a restricted account so the member ssh'ing in a commit using git only has access to the repo and can't get a login shell.
Microsoft Windows but last, due to the W I guess but macOS has no Apple in it.
Windows deserves being at the bottom
How do you get to that conclusion?