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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

The fact is that workflows that are forced on you by hosting a project on SourceHut don't work for the majority of open source contributors anymore.

It's no reason for hate or any kind of personal attacks of course, but saying "then don't contribute" is not an option for most project leads that want to build successful open source software today. You have to choose your audience and the size of it.

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If the maintainer chooses to use SourceHut they know and accept the costs and benefits.

Anecdotally, the quality:quantity ratio in regards to both contributions and contributors is far higher if you use a service like SourceHut. There are no activity charts so there's no reason to game the system with low effort pull requests and features.

Really must be anecdotal, I've been running a major open source project on Github for 3 years now and the only pull requests I've ever had to turn away were major refactorings that I preferred to do myself. You can work very methodically and receive high quality contributions everywhere - as I said, really depends on your audience.

I don't understand this. If the workflow doesn't work for you wouldn't it just make more sense to use a different platform anyway?

It isn't about you-the-project-maintainer, it is about you-the-project-contributor. That criticism seems to come from the latter, i.e. people who dislike SourceHut's workflow and feel that if they want/need/have to contribute to a project hosted on it, that project's workflow would be forced on them. From that perspective it makes sense that there would be people that try to dissuade others from hosting their projects on it.

what about that workflow doesn't work? (i don't actually know, i didn't try using sourcehut yet) is the problem that it isn't like github?

To my knowledge Sourcehut is strictly based on mailing lists and email patches, which is by no means obsolete (Linux still uses them for a good reason) but old-fashioned compared to say, Github PRs, limiting a pool of potential contributors.

Drew wrote an interesting piece on the mail-based workflow (I linked to it elsewhere on this page). Yes it's been around for awhile, but it also seems like it really works better for certain use-cases.

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