[kelnos]

In the "easy" path, you're neglecting the lack of standardization in the "attach/upload" step. For some projects it might be as simple as "create an account on their bug tracker and open a new bug and attach the patch", but for others it might be "dig through their website to find a mailing list, dig more to figure out how to subscribe to that mailing list, send email". and then you might: "get a bounce because the patch is too large", or have to "repost because your mailer posted the patch in-line instead of an attachment, which corrupted it", or...

As much as I hate centralization, especially when the central entity is a for-profit corporation running closed software, often that ends up giving you a standardized experience that makes things easier. "Easier" doesn't have to mean fewer steps; I agree that the GitHub workflow you describe isn't simpler, but if you've done it a few times, it's mechanical and you don't need to think about it. GH even provides a command-line tool[0] that lets you avoid most of the click-around-on-website steps.

[0] https://github.com/github/hub

[colbyrussell]

I agree with some of what you say—one caveat is that you're still on the hook, for example, for finding out which GitHub URL/repo maps to the project you want to contribute to. In practice, this is roughly on par with the difficulty of finding the link to the self-hosted Bugzilla instance. It's a shame that decentralized single sign-on is still such a disaster, since that's essentially the one thing that GitHub has as a leg up over other options—assuming you've contributed to some other GitHub project before.

To stray outside the lines with some meta-commentary: it's nice to get a well thought out response instead of the sort of kneejerk rooting-for-my-home team that's on display in the wasteland of intellectual dishonesty in the comments below.

[tracker1]

I'm not sure it's the same... when I search for issues and contributions... I almost always google for github projectname etc. When it's in GH, usually it's easy enough (unless issues are closed because they're managed with a different repo).

For the most part it's the same workflow. Also, if it's a trivial change (like fixing/appending something in documentation) you don't even need to leave the browser.

Discovery is another issue... it's far more easy to use Github semi-socially than most other platforms. Something I both love and hate is that GH doesn't have a direct message functionality. On the one hand, I wouldn't want to be bothered with a ton of end user emails for the same issues over and over... on another, after you've waited a week for a bug fixing PR, it's not fun either.