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Comment by bru | Hacker News Reader

>easier contributing

Er... what? What's hard about contributing? You don't have to go through a web interface for everything? IMHO that makes it easier.

    $ git clone git://c9x.me/ed.git
    <do your changes>
    $ git format-patch --cover-letter <any other options you want> <commits>
    <edit the file if you want>
    $ git send-email <the file>

`man git send-email` will tell you anything you need to know: configuration options, examples... If is well-written and straightforward! Seems like the author isn't interested in public issue tracking (yet), and using Github wouldn't have changed that.

I, for one, celebrate that he's not using Github. I'm very afraid of the git == github trend I'm seeing amongst many people (technically semi-literate or even technical people)

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Excellent points. Monocultures are terribly harmful, especially in the open-source side of things. While github is convenient, it's not the right answer for a lot of things and terribly inconvenient for others.

I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.

You use vim outliner plugin for the issues? How does that work?

Are your issues simple text files describing it? In a "issues" folder? Do you enforce a format? How do you track their status?

Not the parent, but I do something similar for projects where I am the only contributor. It is far easier to track them with a simple text editor.

For multiple contributors, I don't think this will scale well, atleast without using some tool on top of the VCS.

Yes. Indent per issue. One .otl file with all issues in it. No format enforced although I'm pretty consistent at writing issues. Once complete the issue is simply deleted. I've done this up to 4 people and it has worked wonderfully even though they had to learn vim :)

You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.

While I'm all for not standardizing on github, git send-email doesn't actually work.

First off, your assumption that people use the command line to interact with git is no longer correct. While that was true when I started using git, that's no longer a requirement for basic usage.

Next, perhaps as a corallary, many computer users don't have local email working, ie 'mail user@example.com' on the command line doesn't work. This means that git send-email also won't work.

Sad to say, but getting git send-email working is (unfortunately) beyond some people (as is getting a working 'tar' command line sans Google, apparently).

It's been a few years, but I got `git send-email` to work pretty easily back when I was contributing to Git. I seem to recall there simply being some configuration to tell it what SMTP server to use, and then just creating a single ~/.gitaliases file to map nicknames to email addresses.

There's also `git imap-send` if you want to have it dump the email into the Drafts folder on an IMAP server, where you can review it and send it from your normal mail client.

I wouldn't mind bitbucket, either. Anything that would give this more exposure.

And, seriously, e-mailing patches is tedious, error-prone and ultimately inefficient. _anything_ that smooths the path for contributors is paramount for a successful project, and I, for one, would love this becoming more than a one-off, niche thing.

(I'd also like to have Alt-Enter instead of Tab on it, and a Mac port, and even though the first is trivial enough to do, the second requires a fair amount of time to implement)

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