我可以通过我的GitLab帐户为GitHub上托管的项目做贡献吗？

Question

I'm new to Git and have started with GitLab which I quite like. One of the projects that I'd like to contribute to is hosted on GitHub. Is there a way for me to contribute to the project from my GitLab account? Is this a bad practice? Are there any limitations?

Answer 1

Technically yes, but you may find that it's not easy getting others to play along.

Both GitHub and GitLab are backed by git, in theory. The way git works is you make your changes, and then you either send the patches for those changes to the maintainer, or you put your changes at a publicly accessible URL and ask them to pull from you. It's called a pull request, and exactly what it sounds like. It's literally just a message that you send to somebody asking if they will do a git pull from your branch. The git client includes a command git request-pull that will format a message that fits a default template giving an overview of which commits are ready that you can use for this purpose.

In practice, people on GitHub and GitLab generally don't work this way. GitHub users use GitHub-style "pull requests", and GitLab users use GitLab-style "merge requests". These are just buttons in the websites' interfaces that work with their own custom APIs. GitHub-style pull requests have† to come from other projects hosted on GitHub, and GitLab-style merge requests have† to come from GitLab. There's nowhere for you to attach your patches on GitLab or GitHub. There's no way to go to a project hosted on GitHub and create a pull request by pasting in the URL where the changes are located.‡

† There's no special technical reason for this. They're just written that way.

‡ You can dump these things into an issue comment, but your mileage may vary as far as getting any other response than the project maintainer telling you they don't accept patches and they don't do real pulls by adding your remote and doing a git pull and they don't accept any changes from people who don't use GitHub.

Answer 2

You can work on your own git repo wherever you want. GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, VSTS, local files, etc.

However, to contribute back to a GitHub repo, you may be asked to issue a pull request from a fork of the original repo on GitHub.

Good news is, you can always work wherever you want and set the GitHub fork as a "remote", and push to it when you are ready to make a pull request