My Sourcehut workflow

One of the main differences between Github - and most popular Git services - is the handling of contributions. Sourcehut uses patchsets instead of pull requests (or merge requests) which - as the ever enthusiast for simple technologies - I very much prefer. The main tool for handling patchsets is email - more precisely mailing lists. When you create a project in sourcehut you can attach mailing lists to it for discussions, announcements or more relevant to this article, to handle contributions.

I've created a project and a mailing list for demo purposes. (And of course a repository with a simple Hello, World! in Go)
I will not bore anyone with how to do Git stuff, but let's assume I created a new branch (feature/hello-dynamic), implemented the new feature, and pushed two commits:

a939081 feat: Add current time
757427f feat: Add dynamic greeting

To be able to send emails using the Git client it needs to be configured. Again, I won't go into details but there's a nice tutorial over yonder that does a better job than me explaining anyway. Once it's all set up all we have to do is actually send the email:

As the output shows this command will generate an email per commit (in reply to the previous one as seen in the headers):

$ git send-email --suppress-cc=all --to="~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel@lists.sr.ht" 'main..'
/var/folders/9h/ppql50gs71bgnlyf75wxczyr0000gn/T/1PoqGQ5KLs/0001-feat-Add-dynamic-greeting.patch
/var/folders/9h/ppql50gs71bgnlyf75wxczyr0000gn/T/1PoqGQ5KLs/0002-feat-Add-current-time.patch
OK. Log says:
Server: smtp.gmail.com
MAIL FROM:<***>
RCPT TO:<~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel@lists.sr.ht>
From: *** <***>
To: ~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel@lists.sr.ht
Subject: [PATCH 1/2] feat: Add dynamic greeting
Date: Sat,  4 Apr 2026 13:43:35 +0100
Message-ID: <20260404124336.79020-1-***>
X-Mailer: git-send-email 2.51.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Result: 250
OK. Log says:
Server: smtp.gmail.com
MAIL FROM:<***>
RCPT TO:<~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel@lists.sr.ht>
From: *** <***>
To: ~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel@lists.sr.ht
Subject: [PATCH 2/2] feat: Add current time
Date: Sat,  4 Apr 2026 13:43:36 +0100
Message-ID: <20260404124336.79020-2-***>
X-Mailer: git-send-email 2.51.0
In-Reply-To: <20260404124336.79020-1-***>
References: <20260404124336.79020-1-***>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Result: 250

We can check our patchset on sourcehut: https://lists.sr.ht/~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel/patches/68699

After a thorough review - assuming everything looks good - the next steps are fairly simple: either export the mbox using the UI and apply it as a patch on main (or whichever branch you want to target) or do it the cool way and use curl (the URL is the list's URL suffixed with /mbox:

curl -s https://lists.sr.ht/~barveyhirdman/patchset-demo-devel/patches/68699/mbox | git am -3

Once that's done, I do an interactive rebase to squash all incoming commits, then push it, change the status and lean back.

Links

• sourcehut lists manual
• aerc - a pretty good email client