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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

my favourites are sourcehut (that has excellent ci, and does not try to be a github clone) and codeberg (with slightly more straightforward migration path from github)

[0] sr.ht

[1] codeberg.org

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Does sourcehut still require patches via email instead of "pull requests"? That was the deal breaker for me last time I looked at it.

> Does sourcehut still require patches via email

I'd guess the technically correct answer to this question is "yes". But sourcehut has very good mailing list support, that is essentially equivalent to github pull requests.

Still, I find the wording of your question a bit prejudiced... as if I asked "does github still require pull requests via a proprietary interface instead of just sending the patches?"

The specific wording sounded a bit judgy to me as well, but I think it's a totally reasonable question. They're just asking about the capability of a product.

It is prejudiced. If you like sending patches over email more power to you, but there’s a reason 99% of the world’s devs does not follow that workflow.

> but there’s a reason 99% of the world’s devs does not follow that workflow.

Is there?

Email was always designed for human to human messages. Patch files need strict formatting (like anything that needs to be machine readable). That means you need to install extra tools, point them at your mail server, configure the mailing list address and proper formatting for each project, then find the right commit range and type in the description into a command line editor every time you send a patch series. The alternative is doing everything manually and that takes even more effort.

Compare that with GitHub where the workflow is push changes to fork, select branch, click to create a PR, write the description in a convenient web form and submit. Less friction and less opportunities to mess up. The solution to a centralized forge is a decentralzied forge, not no forge.

Feels like you make the email workflow sound more complicated than it is on purpose. One could do that with the PR workflow as well.

The email workflow has features that GitHub doesn't have. Most people do without them and don't really feel a need to learn about them, and that's fine. But would Linux be better off with GitHub? Not sure.

Come on, there were people using Gerrit instances (which had better PR UI than GH implementation) for good reasons even before GitHub became popular.

I'm a happy paying customer of both, have been for a while. I use SourceHut for private repos, Codeberg for GH mirrors.

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