Comment via GitHub Pull Request | Hacker News Reader

Comment via GitHub Pull Request

ja3k.com

21 pointsja3k11 comments

This almost feels like it might be a bit cleaner opening an "Issue" per blog post/article post, automated via GH:Actions.

I posted it to /r/github and someone let me know such a thing already exists: https://utteranc.es/ A little cleaner than what I've done here.

And its clone https://giscus.app/ using Github Discussions instead.

I like projects like this; totally unnecessary, but fun in a kind of absurd way.

I tried to post a comment but I didn’t really want to fork your repo, is there no other way of doing it thru github’s api?

The commit has to be in someone's repo, and GitHub can't reasonably allow you to push to a branch on the original repo, so you have to make a fork.

Thanks! Yeah it was fun to do. Once I had the idea I felt compelled to implement it.

It is a little wasteful to fork the whole repo to make a comment. But it seems unavoidable with this design.

Forks don’t actually create a copy of the git objects, so effectively it’s just a row in the database.

Then how come Github shows you the photocopying page, sometimes for quite a while? It takes long enough to convince me it does more than set a pointer.

It's not "just a database row," I oversimplified a bit too much perhaps, but it pretty much is very very little in the way of data. Since the following blog post, more stuff has been added to Git (2018, iirc): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_i... https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519

https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/

> Very early on we figured out that actually forking people’s repositories was not sustainable. For instance, there are almost 11,000 forks of Rails hosted on GitHub: if each one of them were its own copy of the repository, that would imply an incredible amount of redundant disk space, requiring several times more fileservers than the ones we have in our infrastructure.

I don't know, but since GitHub allows you to show commits from any fork with a URL referencing another fork, GitHub seems to use a common object store for all forks.

Maybe setting up the separate issue tracker and Pull Requests takes some time?

I wouldn’t say unnecessary; most available comment systems are either a Discuss-style firehose of tracking scripts, or a pain to maintain when self-hosted.

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