It can depends on who will be in charge of accepting your pull request.
If it is Linus Torvalds, well... a good old patch is preferable:
I don't do github pull requests.
github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull.
The diffstat is also deficient and useless.
Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version.
As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things.
It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage.
I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.
He details:
In order for me to pull from github, you need to:
- (a) make a real pull request, not the braindamaged crap that github does when you ask it to request a pull:
- real explanation,
- proper email addresses,
- proper shortlog, and
- proper diffstat.
- (b) since github identities are random, I expect the pull request to be a signed tag, so that I can verify the identity of the person in question.
I also refuse to pull commits that have been made with the github web interface.
Again, the reason for that is that the way the github web interface work, those commits are invariably pure crap.
Commits done on github invariably have totally unreadable descriptions, because the github commit making thing doesn't do any of the simplest things that the kernel people expect from a commit message:
- no "short one-line description in the first line"
- no sane word-wrap of the long description you type: github commit messages tend to be (if they have any description at all) one long unreadable line.
- no sign-offs etc that we require for kernel submissions.
github could make it easy to write good commit messages and enforce the proper "oneliner for shortlogs and gitk, full explanation for full logs".
But github doesn't.
Instead, the github "commit on the web" interface is one single horrible text-entry field with absolutely no sane way to write a good-looking message.
When challenged on the text area for commit messages:
@torvalds The GitHub commit UI provides a text area for commit messages.
This supports new lines and makes it easy to do nicely formatted commit messages :)
No it doesn't.
What it supports is writing long lines that you have not a f*cking clue how long they are.
The text area does not do line breaks for you, and you have no way to judge where the line breaks would go.
In other words, it makes it very hard indeed to do "nicely formatted commit messages".
It also doesn't enforce the trivial "oneliner for shortlog" model, so the commit messages often end up looking like total crap in shortlogs and in gitk.
So the github commit UI should have
- separate "shortlog" one-liner text window, so that people cannot screw that up.
- some way to actually do sane word-wrap at the standard 72-column mark.
- reminders about sign-offs etc that some projects need for project-specific or even legal reasons.
