I'm really looking forward to some form of federated forking and federated pull requests, so that it doesn't matter as much where your repository is.
I'm watching this pretty closely, I've been mirroring my GitHub repos to my own forgejo instance for a few weeks, but am waiting for more federation before I reverse the mirrors.
Also will plug this tool for configuring mirrors: https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO
Note that Forgejo's API has a bug right now and you need to manually re-configure the mirror credentials for the mirrors to continue to receive updates.
Once the protocols are in place, one hopes that other forges could participate as well, though the history of the internet is littered with instances where federation APIs just became spam firehoses (see especially pingback/trackback on blog platforms).
I wonder if federation will also bring more diversity into the actual process. Maybe there will be hosts that let you use that Phabricator model.
I also wonder how this all gets paid for. Does it take pockets as deep as Microsoft's to keep npm/GitHub afloat? Will there be a free, open-source commons on other forges?
Can't you branch off from their head and cherry-pick your commits?
I can see merit in your suggestion, but it does require some discipline in practice. I’m not sure I could do it.
You can push any ref not necessarily HEAD. So as long as you send commit in order from a rebase on main it should be ok unless I got something wrong from the doc?
GitHub could have been project hosting and patch submission. It's the natural model for both the style of contributions that you see most on GitHub today and how it's used by Linux. (Pull requests are meant for a small circle of trusted collaborators that you're regularly pulling from and have already paid the one-time cost to set up in your remotes—someone is meant to literally invoke git-pull to get a whole slew of changes that have already been vetted by someone within the circle of frequent collaborators—since it is, after all, already in their tree—and anyone else submits patches.) Allowing simple patch submission poses a problem, though, in that even if Alice chooses to host projects on GitHub, then Bob might decide Gitorious is better and host stuff there even while remaining friendly and sending patches to Alice's GitHub-hosted project. By going with a different, proprietary pull request system and forcing a clunky forking workflow on Alice and Bob, on the other hand, you can enforce where the source of the changes are coming from (i.e. another repo hosted on GitHub). And that's what they did.
I don’t know how the Agit-flow stores the commit, but I assume it would have to be in the main repo, which I’m happy to not be used for random PRs.
Requiring forks makes it more convoluted for simple quick pushes, but I can see why it would be done this way.
I suspect the real answer is that’s the way Linux is developed. Traditionally, the mai developers all kept their own separate branches that would be used track changes. When it was time for a new release, the appropriate commits would then be merged into the main repository. For large scale changes, having separate forks makes sense — there is a lot to track. But, it does make the simple use-case more difficult. Git was designed to make the complex use-cases possible, sometimes at the expense of usability for simpler use cases.
Sure, the world has pretty much decided it hates the protocol. However, people _were_ doing all of that.
There's not much point in observing "but you could have done those things with email!". We could have done them with tarballs before git existed, too, if we built sufficient additional tooling atop them. That doesn't mean we have the functionality of current forges in a federated model, yet.
Those exist (badly and not integrated) as part of additional tools such as email, or as tasks done manually, or as part of forge software.
I don't think there's much point in splitting this hair further. I stand by the original statement that I'd love to see federated pull requests between forges, with all the capabilities people expect of a modern forge.
There is code or repository, there is a diff or patch. Everything else your labeling as pull request is unknown, not part of original design, debatable.
GitHub style pull request is not part of the original design. What aspects and features you want to keep, and what exactly you say many others are interested in?
We don't even know what a forge is. Let alone a modern one.
Give me “email” PR process anytime. Can review on a flight. Offline. Distraction free. On my federated email server and have it work with your federated email server.
And the clients were pretty decent, at running locally. And it still works great for established projects like Linux Kernel etc.
It’s just pain to set up for a new project, compared to pushing to some forge. But not impossible. Return the intentionality of email. With powerful clients doing threading, sorting, syncing etc, locally.
I think it's dwm that explicitly advertises a small and elitist userbase as a feature/design goal. I feel like mailing lists as a workflow serve a similar purpose, even if unintentionally.
With the advent of AI slop as pull request I think I'm gravitating to platforms with a higher barrier to entry, not lower.
Yes, it takes time to learn, but that is true for anything worthwhile.
The advantage of old-school was partially that the user agents, were in fact user agents. Greasemonkey tried to bridge the gap a bit, but the Web does not lend itself to much user-side customization, the protocol is too low level, too generic, offering a lot of creative space to website creators, but making it harder to customize those creations to user’s wants.