I wouldn't mind doing a self-hosted git repo and only using cli if I didn't have to also use email to do so.
Seriously the worst part. Email is a technology that should be left in the past. It's just awful. There's no good way to do email.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Do you mean sending patches by email? The author for the article also despises them as suggest alternatives for collaboration where you do "pull request" by people giving you a link to their repo and branch name (like literally asking you to try pulling from their git repo), or sending git bundle files which get around a lot of the problems of trying to send patch files around.
Yes. The only way to send patches without something like Github is over email. I don't mind all the other stuff, but there's no other way to do PRs than over email, and I hate email. I didn't see that he gave alternatives. His preferred solution was an email
The formal PR button in a forge is a way to do that with one click, but a short email with all the same information is just as good.
Like, dawg, no it aint
Email isn't "the only way" to send patches. In fact, he addresses that:
It doesn’t have to be by email, either. Any method of sending this data to the maintainer is fine. For example, I’m on Mastodon – so you could send me a repository URL via Mastodon if you really wanted to (provided you didn’t mind my responses being very short). Or you could send patches via any other communications medium that you and the maintainer are both on, if it lets you attach files to messages.
His preferred method is just sending a URL over email. You can use any communication method if you both already have an account.
I agree that some public discussion place for patches is an absolute necessity.
No idea what that would look like for the blogger though, maybe Lemmy isn't even that bad? You don't even need a Lemmy account to interact, he could use Mastodon to respond.
But yeah the overall vibe of the blog is very much luddite and boomer.
and Sourceforge now has a pretty bad reputation
The bad reputation is largely obsolete. The owner had changed to a bad owner with bad practices, but that owner was eventually replaced by a better owner again.
I still hate the UI though. We have much better alternatives today, which is why I don't see any reason for anyone to go back to (or start) using Sourceforge. It's no longer an issue of owner and bad practices, but solely of the platform itself with its UI/UX.
Introduction
I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them.
These days, all my projects are held in Git. And mostly, I put them in ‘bare’ git repositories on my personal website.
I don’t use any git ‘forge’ system layered on top of Git, like Gitlab or Github, which automatically makes a bug tracking database for each project, and provides a convenient button for a user to open a merge request / pull request. I just use plain Git. People can ‘git clone’ my code, and there’s a web-based browsing interface (the basic gitweb) for looking around without having to clone it at all. But that’s all the automated facilities you get.
Occasionally this confuses people, so I thought I should write something about it.
Discussion with the author @ https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114111520633445984
I think it's an interesting idea, and I'd see it as fine for simple host + fetch. But as soon as you start interacting, I see it as far worse.
A personal support email may work, but as they write by the end, ticket tracking and collaborating on a platform with a shared web interface is much superior for information sharing and but also iteration (they talk about back and forth emailing earlier).
Self-hosting yet another platform/forge with its own account system is not viable to me either. (I'm still hoping for forgejo federation for a centralized account. Until then, GitHub seems like the best choice purely because it's the biggest and everyone has an account and can contribute and post without account barriers.)
The idea that it could be a hosted repo with an integrated mailing list (and potentially bug tracker) is interesting, but ultimately, almost/actually a full forge then anyway.
Saying it's "an interesting idea" makes it sound as if git wasn't intended to be used like this from the start. But it was intentionally designed to allow posting patches to the Linux kernel mailing lists. It even has commands for producing email directly from the command line.
Sites like GitHub are the "idea".
I think his dude would be better er served by radicle. He can host his seed node, people can push their branches into namespaces in the bare git repositories there, they can request that those branches be merged into a branch in his namespace, they can create tickets that are all stored in the git repositories, comments on patches/merge requests/etc. are also in git, he can add trusted contributors, and so on.
People don't have to create an account. Just a public key pair on their machine and they are off to the races.
I don't know his email, but somebody could mail him and make him aware of radicle.