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

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 8:31 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> They are. Ultimately, a GitHub pull request is backed by a git pull
>> request.
>
> There is no such thing as a "git pull request", except in the
> ordinary english meaning of the word request. It is true that a
> pull request is, from one angle, a formalized request for someone
> to execute a git pull command.  But there is no command to create
> a "pull request", nowhere for such a thing to exist in the
> repository, etc.

As Trevor mentioned, git does have such a thing - it's not as well
known as some other uses of the term, but it definitely does exist.
Ultimately, though, it's simply a request: "please pull from here".
There's not a lot to store.

> When I tried github it was also very unclear how someone can pull
> to a github repository from a source other than another github
> repository with an associated github pull request. I suppose they
> could pull into their local repository and then push to github.

If you're not using a GitHub PR, then what you're doing is using GH to
host your repository. So yes, you pull into your local repo and then
push to GH. That's exactly what you'd do with pretty much any other
workflow; currently, how would a core committer apply a patch to
CPython? Apply it locally, then push. DVCSes pretty much exclusively
work that way.

> Also if someone puts through a github pull request and then their
> patch is accepted, my understanding is that the pull request has
> to be "closed" through a github online interface and merely
> merging the patch through the git command line will not update the
> status on the pull request.

GitHub is smart enough to recognize a straight-forward merge;
otherwise (maybe you cherry-picked some commits only, or something),
you can use standard notation like "Closes #1234" to signal what
you're doing. But...

>> Since actual bug discussion isn't
>> being moved away from bugs.python.org, this should be safe.

... this is still true.

> I don't think you can really narrow "actual bug discussion" like
> that.  Some discussion takes place on the bug tracker, some
> discussion takes place here, some discussion takes place on
> python-ideas, some discussion takes place on other mailing
> lists... and it's suspected that some discussion will take place
> on github.  All of that discussion has value, and it's not good to
> have any of it locked up in a place that cannot be exported.

Sure, some discussion takes place on mailing lists. And I'm sure some
of the discussion takes place on IRC, and in elevators on the way up
to the 34th floor of some building somewhere. Are we going demand a
logging IRCbot, and panic because we still can't capture the latter?
No. If the discussion is important enough to be kept, it can be done
on a place that's designed for keeping it: b.p.o.

ChrisA