It would be really nice if the other features of github could get into the decentralized model of git... I could imagine issues and PR reviews/comments all being mini-commits to some kind of parallel metadata repo under the hood for example.
It never seemed like the distributed "selling point" of Git (and Mercurial et al) really caught on. I remember trying to extoll it's virtues to our team at the time (pre-Github). No one source of truth as such, just everyone swapping changes as needed. It's kind of ironic that Git's most popular incarnation is based upon a centralised model.
Is it just a case of the distributed workflow just not being that useful for most people? Beyond the obvious example of Linux kernel development, of course!
I think in practice it's most useful as a recovery feature. I once got locked out of my Bitbucket account and had to recover a repo, which I'd been paid to develop, from Heroku of all places. I was extremely grateful at that point that all git repos are complete mirrors of each other.
Distributed workflow is still plenty useful, but the master copy being hosted by GitHub doesn't really affect it all that much. The real benefit was the ability to clone a repo and just start working on it locally - with commit history, branches etc - and then tidying it up and merging it back upstream when possible and convenient.
Are people forgetting what life was like back in SVN days, when not having a connection to the server meant not being able to do many operations?
I guess GitHub CLI is kind of porcelain for the `git format-patch` and `git am`. Although I don’t know of any git commands that will send or fetch the `.patch` files to the mailbox.
git send-email and git imap-send can send to a mailbox (the latter can be used to upload files to an IMAP folder). I don't know of a command that could download patches from a mailbox (though it would be nice if git provided one that would work with IMAP and/or NNTP).
