"Can only view diffs on a single page"
You don't need to use GitHub to view diffs.
"To create a patch one must fork the repository publicly (weird and unnecessary)."
I don't think it's weird.
"Accepting a patch creates a "merge commit" (ugly repo history)."
You don't need to have a merge commit, although I don't think that creates an ugly repo history.
"In general, pull request culture is not about code review."
I have no idea what this means.
Companies/organizations have different requirements for code reviews. Yes you can review code in pull requests, but in my opinion, it was not built for code reviews. In my previous company, we had a very rigorous code review process, which includes pre and post commit code reviews. We used Collaborator[1] and ReviewBoard[2] for code reviews and I totally understand why the Go team would use Gerrit over pull requests for code review.
[1] http://smartbear.com/product/collaborator/overview/ [2] https://www.reviewboard.org/
Me either. To me, the entire point of pull requests is about triggering (code) reviews. If I don't want to bother with review, why not just grant direct push access and skip the rubber stamp ceremony?
If I don't trust someone enough to grant write access to my repo, I certainly don't trust them enough to rubber stamp their pull requests.
Although I agree, I don't think merge commits are ugly. I think people coming from SVN/CVS where history is strictly linear have this obsession with keeping it that way.
In fact I find lots of developers just have an obsession with "clean" history, and fetishes for particular tools. It baffles me.
This has absolutely nothing to do with those, especially since they didn't even allow cleaning up histories. There is one very simple reason for why some developers prefer a linear history of master:
It makes debugging very easy.
With branch merges, especially when the branch lines cross, or the merge is an octopus merge, the complexity of the code necessitating inspection to find the root cause of a bug straight-up explodes. Meanwhile with a linear history it's not only easy, but automatable to find a commit that breaks a thing.
I do realize that you may not have had the displeasure yet to be in the situation to learn these things. Please feel free to consider yourself fortunate, but please also do try to understand that the things i just wrote are in fact simple observation of realities.
Your condescension is only hurting yourself.
Frankly, i find your style of argument through implication, and through trying to disregard something because it doesn't fit your definition of truth to be much more condescending than anything i wrote before.
"Revision that were never built nor tested" is probably closer to the truth. Do you rewind through all your history and rebuild and retest every commit in a branch every time you rebase? Sure, they're similar, and you probably didn't mess up the merges. There's likely no subtle lingering bugs that QA's only going to catch weeks down the line. Probably.
> then you may end up in a mess, but it's your fault. Code review is a thing that is done for a reason.
Sure. But I've missed so many things in code reviews, had so many things in my own code missed in code reviews, and generally make mistakes and messes.
I do agree that simpler branch topology tend to be easier to reason about. But branches do have their advantages... and I've also found that preserving the original branch topology has helped me untangle merge mistakes that were missed, committed, and then only discovered a year or more later.
Yes.