It’s frustrating that now we’re back to repo fragmentation and figuring out where and how to contribute has regressed 20 years
What?
Step 1: go to project's manpage/readme or website.
Step 2: find the URL of their software forge (git/svn/hg site).
Step 3: clone and contribute using that website.
That process has been largely the same for a lot more than 20 years. Most people were not using GitHub as a discovery/random-repo-browsing system.
Now i have 5+ accounts, 5+ places where the forks are kept, 2-3 different protocols, just to submit a patch.
GitHub was one app, one protocol, one account, one index.
> create new account
I don't think "need to create an account to figure out that you can't contribute with a given forge" is a real problem. They're just as publicly browsable sans-login as GitHub, for the same reasons: people want to share their stuff. And when you do need to make an account, most software forges have SSO with the big/common providers.
> find it archived, google for new repo, find that one archived, go to new repo
You needed to RTFM and do a bit of research to figure out where/how to contribute for GitHub projects too. They got archived/moved around/invisibly-forked just as often as people move forges today. How many times have you seen. "FizzBuzz is archived and no longer accepting contributions; an actively maintained rebuild of this project is at https://github.com/somebody/FizzBuzz-ng"?
> find they now take patches via email instead of PRs
Plenty of GitHub repos either don't accept contributions via GitHub PR (Linux) or require lots of nonstandard hoop-jumping to get a contribution approved (Python).
> 2-3 different protocols
Git is the protocol. I don't think the move away from GitHub is making anyone move away from Git. hg/jj/svn are still minority tools for the same reasons they always were.
> one index
It's Git. The index is folders on your hard drive. List their origins if you forget the URLs of their forges. Make a browser bookmark if you don't want to keep the checkout around.
Under the most charitable interpretation of your complaints that I can come up with, contributing in a not-universally-GitHub world is like ... 1% harder per repo contributed to. At most. To the tune of, at the very absolute worst, like 2 minutes of extra work when making your very first contribution to a project. I don't think it's that hard to stop googling "ProjectName github" and start googling "ProjectName git source" or "ProjectName contribute code".
which FM? now there are 5 copies around the internet.
We're clearly arguing over aesthetics. but generally everyone praised Github for standardizing contributions from the earlier state of 20+ forges / mailing list protocols, diff workflows etc.
And now we're heading backward.
git is one of the protocols that github extended to build a complete product. So moving to 5 forges means 5 protocols (some email based)
github offers more than git. it has a search index, code search, PRs, a community, developer following , a feed and more.
> one index ; It's Git
github isn't git. it's index is a full text index of all the repos, developers, artifacts, repositories and more. having this indexed in one place has tremendous value.
For someone so smug, you're incredibly myopic.