> Suppose you want to make a Pull Request or just take a copy of the code. At the moment, you have to create a fork on my server. There's no way to easily fork something to your GitHub or personal server.

Why are people so keen on having that network graph of forks? It's not necessary for collaboration. Status symbol?

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edent 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't see it as a status thing - I see it as a convenience thing.

If I want to fork your code and contribute back, that means I need to be on the same system as you.

There's a bunch of Gnome projects which require me to sign up to their specific git hosting service before I can contribute.

On most git servers, I have to fork in order to send a PR, which often means I have to create a fork on their system - which means I need to set up something to replicate it to my local machine.

It's all friction.

I'd love to see a project on (for example) GitHub and then clone it to my GitLab, work on it there, and send a PR from GL to GH.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If I want to fork your code and contribute back, that means I need to be on the same system as you.

You really don't. You just clone, code, commit, and send a patch (which is just one or more text files). That's it. You may just code and do a diff, if it's a simple fix.

The project may have a more complex policy to accept contributions. But a Fork and a PR is not a requirement.

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edent 4 days ago | parent [-]

OK. Let's say I clone to my local machine, make some changes, and commit.

How do I submit the patch to the repo on GitHub / GitLab / CodeBerg / whatever?

Presumably I need to hunt down the maintainer's email?

	▲	skydhash 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The emails are in the commit log.

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__david__ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

GitHub could implement that tomorrow—there’s zero technical reason why they couldn’t have a foreign pull request ui. Unfortunately it’s in their vested interest to keep forks on their platform. If anyone were going to implement that it’d be one of the smaller self hosting oriented projects like gittea or its fork with the terrible name I can never remember nor pronounce.

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webstrand 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

On lower frequency repos, I often look through the github forks to find patches for issues or features that were not upstreamed. Its not infrequent I find a nice feature someone implemented for themselves but didn't upstream because it wasn't quite quality enough, making a PR is a lot of effort especially when its not clear that it'll ever be accepted.