On 04/26/2014 02:38 PM, Barrett wrote:
I would like to just quote what there's in the github repo home page : "Please do not perform Pull Requests here. They will be ignored. Patches can be sent to http://dev.haiku-os.org/";.
The main reason for this is that the github repository is just a mirror of our main repository (as is the gitorious repository).
With a little web search you may find developers saying more or less frequently things like "we prefer patches instead of pull requests". So yes it's possible, but this doesn't mean explicitly that it's really done. So where there's an infrastructural possibility thanks to git, Haiku remains an old style cvs patch project like 90s. AFAIK pull are used only by commit members to merge their own stuff.
No, git itself does not provide the infrastructure for "pull requests" as seen on github, gitorious, bitbucket,.... That is an additional feature of their service. Since we don't use any of those except for mirroring, we don't have that feature available.
Our equivalent of a pull request would be adding your branch URL to a Trac ticket. A committer would then have to add that remote, pull the branch, and merge/rebase it. That is more work than simply downloading a patch and applying it, which is why patches (and no, not CVS patches, but git format-patch style patches) are preferred ATM.
Adding a "Commit" button to our Trac -- so that patches can be applied directly from the browser (ideally going through an automatic rebuild check first) -- has been on our wish list for years. Unfortunately no one has implemented it yet.
While that probably wouldn't completely solve our patch backlog problem, it would hopefully shrink it significantly.
CU, IngoPS: The pull request implementations I've seen seem to merge instead of rebase, which introduces an unnecessary merge commit, making the history ugly. Moreover it seems to be non-trivial to convince contributors to clean up their branches which they request being pulled, which results in even more merge commits in the history (as can e.g. be seen in the HaikuPorts repository).
