The author has this completely backward: this is fundamentally a social problem - the difference is that with GitHub it's actually visible. Anyone old enough to remember the pre-DVCS era should remember chasing down patches in bug trackers, blog posts, etc. and maintaining local forks — with the requisite terror-inducing periodic gigantic merges. Now we've lost all of the manual labor in that process and made it easy for anyone who wants to do things the right way to do so – it's still possible to waste your collaborators' time if you really want to but before it was almost a requirement of the process.
As a minor point of craft, this also illustrates an area where more training is needed: the problems described are most common when someone makes a fork and keeps every single commit in a single branch. Using feature branches – and it'd be awesome if Github started encouraging that with the fork & edit model – makes most of the listed problems far more manageable.
As a minor point of craft, this also illustrates an area where more training is needed: the problems described are most common when someone makes a fork and keeps every single commit in a single branch. Using feature branches – and it'd be awesome if Github started encouraging that with the fork & edit model – makes most of the listed problems far more manageable.