I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I don't have commit access to their repository; I just have my local clone. In normal usage, should I want to try fixing a bug or making some other improvement, I'd simply hack on the local repository until I felt satisfied with the change, then mail the diff to some maintainer for review. What "cruft" is there for anyone to see?
With the pull-request model, there's a lot of Github-specific folderol necessary to accomplish the same task. Perhaps the pull request process offers some significant benefit for the maintainers, which I haven't been able to see, but whatever it is, it must be weighed against the fact that the complexity of the pull-request process creates a barrier to entry. I can think of two situations where I had enough interest in contributing to a project that I downloaded the code and diagnosed the issue that was bugging me, but gave up when it started to look like it was going to take an hour of extra github hoop-jumping and potentially days of review and testing process just to share my one-line fix.
If I'd already been a participant in those projects, dealing with the process might not have been such an issue; but as an outsider, the pull request work flow is a pretty clear "get serious about joining our project, or go away" message. So, I went away. Perhaps those projects will fix those bugs themselves, eventually.
With the pull-request model, there's a lot of Github-specific folderol necessary to accomplish the same task. Perhaps the pull request process offers some significant benefit for the maintainers, which I haven't been able to see, but whatever it is, it must be weighed against the fact that the complexity of the pull-request process creates a barrier to entry. I can think of two situations where I had enough interest in contributing to a project that I downloaded the code and diagnosed the issue that was bugging me, but gave up when it started to look like it was going to take an hour of extra github hoop-jumping and potentially days of review and testing process just to share my one-line fix.
If I'd already been a participant in those projects, dealing with the process might not have been such an issue; but as an outsider, the pull request work flow is a pretty clear "get serious about joining our project, or go away" message. So, I went away. Perhaps those projects will fix those bugs themselves, eventually.