On Nov 29, 2015, at 11:08 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 7:54 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
On 30 November 2015 at 03:12, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback. And the "do nothing" option is there, although it's
> so disliked by so many people that the chances of us not changing our
> workflow is pretty slim.

The interests of folks that prefer the terminal focused
"commit-locally-and-push" workflow can still be taken into account in
the evaluation though - while it appears likely either GitHub or
GitLab will be adopted as the repository management service, whether
or not the maintenance branches and the default branch are marked as
protected so even core developers *have* to go through the web based
merge process is a separate question.

What?! I've never worked with a GitHub-based project where you *had* to use the web-based merge process. Hopefully that's not really on the table. In fact I'm not a big fan of GitHub's web-based merge process at all -- I much prefer seeing a simple linear history in the master (and I don't like preserving intermediate commits made during the PR review process).

I don’t believe Github even has an option where you *have* to use the web-based merge process. The closest thing they have is protected branches (disables force pushes, but not regular pushes) and required status checks (PRs have to pass certain pre merge tests before the merge button lights up).

Maybe the required status checks disables pushes all together but I don’t think it does and even if it did that feature (as currently implemented anyways) doesn’t make sense for us because it essentially requires all PRs to get rebased or have master merged into them before they can be merged via the merge button which is a massive pain for OSS teams of any size or velocity.

There are also tools like git-pulls (Ruby:
https://github.com/schacon/git-pulls) and hub (Go:
https://hub.github.com/) that let folks review and merge GitHub PRs
from the terminal. (I had a quick look through some of the command
line clients listed at https://about.gitlab.com/applications/, but
didn't see anything as workflow focused as git-pulls or hub, so "good
support for terminal based usage" may count as a concrete technical
differentiator here)

Review and merge process should be separable. After 10+ years of using web-based review tools I personally wouldn't dream of using a terminal-based *review* (as opposed to merge) process. Though of course if that's your preference you should be able to do it.