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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity.

I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)

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> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.

This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

I am stunned by the fact at a 13+years old comment can be dug out, just like this, and presented as a valid argyment in a conversation.

How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

> How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

Oh! That's easy. I forgot that it is 13+ years old! XD

Added later: Your comment made me look up more details about it. It was a widely discussed comment at the time. The HN discussion about it is as interesting as the comment itself [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876

I still don't get the line wrapping hangup. Doesn't every modern text editor have an option to auto wrap existing text? Why should I manually limit text to an arbitrary 72 character width between newlines?

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.

It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.

Honestly that sounds kinda neat and I guess you can see traces of that idea today: I have a million unread GitHub notifications about things I don’t care about

> If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else

When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.

The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.

Can confirm. Pull request is something Linus talks about in the early days of git before he even acknowledged the existence of GitHub.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.

The use of "fork" predates GitHub as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

Yeah, it's an older term but forking in that sense is a pretty big deal. GitHub fork is just a button press and can be done basically automatically when you are interested in a repo.

Ah okay I see what you mean

How about an issue tracker that reacts to commit messages and pull requests?

Yeah, for me the most "magical" bit was when you pushed something to your fork and it would prompt you to make a pull request for it.

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