On Sat, 18 Apr 2015 at 18:01 Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> wrote:
> The github pull request is just a nice UI over a patch. What on earth > is wrong with that? > Unfortunately, github pull requests have limitations compared with patches, archived for example on a mailing list. For blog post on this see: https://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-request-workflow-implementation IIRC, my understanding is that creating a patch request means you can't ever delete the branch associated with the pull request or you can't see the patch any more from the pull request. Yes, the patch request remains important even after the patch has been merged, because it can include discussions on how a particular set of decisions was made concerning the change in question. Also worth noting that, while git is a distributed service, some of the services github provides are not distributed, most notably the issue tracker and pull requests (not sure it is possible to disable pull requests). You can only get these discussions from the central github server and emails from the server. If github went down you would lose all this information (yes, you can back it up - does anyone do so?) (side note: github's wiki is based on git and open source software - gollum - so can - at least in theory - be distributed. Although last I checked open source software had features not implemented in github because github was using an old version of gollum - not sure if that is still the case or not; at the time it meant my pages didn't work both in guthub and gollum at the same time) I am not saying that we should not use github - I use it all the time (with and without gerrit), however we should be aware of its limitations.
