Re: GitHub's ³pull request² is proprietary lock-in

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Anyone can take email data from the email server, migrate it to a
> different implementation of the same email system, keep it running with
> the same data and allow the same people to continue interacting with it
> as before.
>
> Those are traits I think a community should require of any system that
> controls vital discussions like pull requests.
>
> If GitHub pull requests could be verified to work that way, I would have
> no complaint here. Until they do, it is foolish for a community to
> willingly put their correspondence data into it.

They are. Ultimately, a GitHub pull request is backed by a git pull
request. Here's an example:

https://github.com/MikeiLL/appension/pull/187

That's a request to pull https://github.com/Rosuav/appension's
log_to_file branch
(https://github.com/Rosuav/appension/tree/log_to_file) into the master
branch. That can be fetched and merged into a local repository:

git pull https://github.com/Rosuav/appension log_to_file

If the official workflow is built on these commands, then it doesn't
depend on GitHub at all. Someone puts through a GH PR and it'll create
an email that provides all the necessary info; but equally, someone
can use any other git hosting and send through an identical pull
request without ever touching GH. Since actual bug discussion isn't
being moved away from bugs.python.org, this should be safe.

ChrisA