Suddenly I can clearly see what must be one of Github's long-term goals: to make git usable end-to-end in the browser, and in a way where that is preferable for certain situations.<p>We're going to continue spending more and more of our computer time in the browser. It's the universal platform.
My gut reaction to this was negative. As much as I like GitHub, I sympathise a lot with Linus Torvalds' concerns about the way it encourages low-quality pull requests [1].<p>However, thinking back through my own experiences with the kind of minor pull requests I've occasionally made to projects in the past, I can see this being quite useful. Have you ever actually cloned a big repo like the kernel's? Even the Node.js repo takes a fair old while. If you're just trying to submit a correction for a minor typo or omission in the project's README, then this feature lowers the barrier from minutes to seconds. Hopefully that will be a net positive for the community.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5659933" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...</a>
Slight self promotion; here is a CLI tool I made to help clear up local and remote branches easily - in case it is still useful to people:<p><a href="https://github.com/elliottcarlson/git-delete-branch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elliottcarlson/git-delete-branch</a>