Ask HN: Do any Git servers support patch sets (i.e., contrib without forks)?

2 pointsby electromechvor 4 Jahren4 comments

A puzzle: patch sets have been with Git since the beginning; why do none of the Git hosting platforms seem to support that workflow?

Is there a service or self-hosted option for exposing my repository in a way that allows contributions without requiring contributors to first create their own fork (and thus also host their fork publicly).

The simplest version of what I want would be a "Merge/Pull Request" workflow initiated by uploading a patch/diff instead of creating a fork and requesting a merge from that fork.

One of the goals is accessibility: ideally anyone could click "Edit" on a file in the web UI to start a "Patch Request."

I've searched extensively for this and haven't come up with much. GitLab and GitHub require contributions to come from forks or branches of the original repo. (Frustratingly, both of them also exclude the option to merge with unrelated histories and have no option for subtree merges.) Bitbucket, Gitea, Gitbucket, etc. appear to use the same process, but I couldn't definitively confirm that. Linux & co use a process of managing patch sets through mailing lists, and I don't understand how they operate, let alone be able to replicate a simpler version of that myself.

I've come across other folks asking for similar features, so I know I'm not alone, but my searches of HN didn't turn up much here, so I'm hopeful there are some fresh ideas here.

3 comments

colinjoyvor 4 Jahren

https://www.gerritcodereview.com comes to mind.

Here is a useful article that contrasts how it works compared to GitHub:

https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Document...

> One of the goals is accessibility: ideally anyone could click "Edit" on a file in the web UI to start a "Patch Request."

I don't think Gerrit would support this out of the box.

stop50vor 4 Jahren

Gitea works on a feature for federated pull requests, so you can make pull requests over different instances, but the next thing i found on my gitea instance is the ability tonapply a patch on the website itself as an logged in user.

electromechvor 4 Jahren

I created an account at gitea.com and when I try to edit a file, it says, "You must fork this repository to make or propose changes to this repository."

(Tried on https://gitea.com/gitea/tea/src/branch/main/README.md)

Edit: IIUC, Gitea doesn't support this yet. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13508

(Side note: it's odd to me that Gitea hosts its source code on GitHub.)

[deleted]vor 4 Jahren

fri_schvor 4 Jahren

You might want to have a look at Sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/). If I recall correctly they support e-mail-only workflows, which means you can contribute by sending patches. I haven't used it myself so far. As far as I know Sourcehut has been designed with the e-mail based wokflow used by the Linux kernel community in mind.