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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .

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PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.

There's technically a way[1], but you'd have to do it every 6 months which is not great.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...

Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn it back on" option is intentional.

It's completely intentional, and goes back to when GitHub was founded. GitHub was intended as a collaborative software development platform, not "look but don't touch".

I suppose you can fork a repository if you want to collaborate with others though. Reviewing pull requests and engaging with a community is a lot of work and has possible legal ramifications; in many cases it’s faster to just do things yourself. Some teams/companies deliberately refuse outside contributions for this reason.

You can close them and limit discussion to contributors I guess? Not ideal but at least they wouldn’t appear in the pull requests tab.

Alternatively you can use a bot or a GitHub Action to automatically change the description and title of the pull request to something like “[PRs are not allowed and deleted automatically]”. But yeah not a perfect solution either…

Yikes, the PRs on the Linux repo are quite terrible. At least there's a bot to auto-reply with the correct procedure.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1370

I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to the contribution docs.

Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.

As another poster noted, you can disable it by limiting all interactions (6 months at a time). It is not ideal, but it does work to for PRs. You should also close all current PRs when you do that so users cannot push to those branches as well.

PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.

This situation has a strong scam smell. Zig has many thousands of open issues on GitHub (nearly 3,500 issues) that appears ripe to get mostly ignored, closed without resolution, or plain disappear from public view. As pointed out, it is correct to shine a light on and review the situation of issues at Zig's GitHub.

The issues for this language are particularly and unlikely to be followed up on or re-posted at Codeberg. Deceptions or smoke screen claims, can trick the public and sponsors or create false impressions about how far away Zig is (after 9 plus years) from actually being production ready and reaching 1.0.

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