Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
I know some projects have their pull request stuff sent to the mailing list email, so it might be possible to use pull requests this way and still be able to follow discussion via the mailing list.
I don't encourage pull requests on Github, as the mailing list is the primary way of discussing proposed changes. On the few occasions where people have made pull requests anyway, I've tried to migrate discussion of the nontrivial changes to the mailing list. Nowadays it's a bit more convenient for me if emailed patches are generated via "git format-patch" or "git send-email" but this is not required. More generally, I'd rather not formally require a lot of Git- or Github-specific features in tz maintenance. There are advantages to having multiple branches, pull requests, etc., but there are also disadvantages and it's not clear that the benefits would outweigh the costs. Although Github is a convenient repository, other repositories are also convenient and Github itself may be superseded some day. And although I prefer Git, the next maintainer may prefer something else. As long as we can talk about changes via patches, pretty much any version-control system will do. Finally, I'd rather keep the experimental repository informal. It's just my personal list of changes that I'm thinking of putting into the next release. It's intended to be releasable at any time (though a release is usually not urgent and we like to put things off :-). Obviously I'll make mistakes sometimes, just as releases themselves sometimes contain mistakes. But these can be fixed.