this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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I checked out fossil once and looks like it doesn’t have an equivalent to Pull Request so I moved on. It wasn’t clear how anyone could begin to be a contributor to a project if I host on fossil.
I mean, Git doesn’t natively have pull requests either…the “official” method involves sending patches through email. It seems that Fossil has a similar setup (although without the tool)..
~~PRs are a feature introduced by GitHub.~~ I guess Fossil bundles would be close enough to them.
EDIT: I was wrong. Turns out Git does have a pull request feature. It requires you to upload your code to a public repository, after which it generates a message asking to pull, which can then be sent via any medium to the repository owner. It doesn’t require patches, or GitHub. Differences to note: these aren’t like GitHub/Gitlab/Gitea pull requests, where you’re given a simple web interface and have to merge from a repository on that instance. Your repository can be hosted anywhere using
git request-pull. You’ll most likely then send the request through email, and get feedback in the form of replies. If you push newer changes to that branch, you’ll have to request another pull, asrequest-pullonly specifies a commit range. But yeah, I guess got technically does have pull requests. (For the scope of OP’s question however, I don’t believe he meant this.)This is objectively wrong! Git has 'request-pull' command that generates a message to an upstream maintainer to pull changes from an online downstream clone. That request message can be sent by email or some other means. But no patches are involved. And no - Github did not invent it. It was there before Github existed. In fact, there is a rant by Torvalds as to how GitHub reimplemented PRs poorly, throwing away good features of the request-pull command.
Thank you for that information. I had no idea that command existed, I guess because primarily I’ve seen people sending patches over email. I’ve updated my original comment with additional information. Thanks for calling me out 😅
Can I interest you in a Torvalds rant?
I didn't see the diff command last time, thanks for that. It still feels like a miss for fossil to host a web view and forum but not a pull request-like section.
Patches have terrible UX. IMO, if projects don't support the equivalent of pull or merge requests, they are just turning away contributors.