On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 06:27:52PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: > > Given that it would be unaceptable to act the way GitHub does, and > that we can't ccnsider making a repo on Savannah for every change a > user proposes, what is the best form of pull-request that we could > consider implementing?
I've never had an account at websites like GitHub or Codeberg, so I may miss the exact details. These are the stages of a pull request: * Publishing an initial patchset. On forges like Codeberg, the user forks the original repository using Web UI, clones that fork, pushes into it, then uses Web UI to notify the developers of the original package and point at the changes. Since the users can't make a fork on Savannah[*], they could clone the original repository, commit changes, then use git format-patch, submit a new item to a tracker of the package with a tarball of the patchset attached, and point at the parent of the first commit. That wouldn't be much harder than on GitHub, but it would be unlike on GitHub. [*] They could make a fork on an independent site like repo.or.cz but I shan't consider this possibility. * Discussing the patchset. As far as I understand, current Savannah trackers support this adequately (or can support if any features are missing). * Publishing updated or alternative patchsets. Likewise, the users can make changes in their local branches and attach new tarballs with patchsets when commenting in the trackers. Again, this isn't considerably more complicated, but it's different. * Applying to the original repository. On forges where users can fork repos, the developers can do that using Web UI. I guess then the website can see the points in the commit tree where to apply the patchsets and merge or rebase them in the original repository. If we want people to do their processing locally, then the developer would download the tarball with the patchset, unpack and apply it to the right branch, then push the result to Savannah. * Closing the request is trivial, so I don't discuss it. To tell the truth, I can see little in this workflow we could 'implement' to simplify the actions. we could write guidelines about those procedures, but then every Savannah group may have their own specifics like the tracker to use (bugs, support requests, tasks, or patch), and---more important---users don't like reading guidelines.
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