A couple of months ago in writing about the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub I said that many projects—large, complicated ones like Linux and Emacs at that—didn’t use GitHub or its siblings at all but depended on email and (raw) Git to manage the project and its codebase. That’s not too surprising given that Git was developed with Linux and its email driven development process in mind.
Still, if all your projects have been mediated by GitHub, it may not be obvious what the alternative looks like. Drew DeVault prefers the email based workflow and has written a post that describes how it works. Git, not surprisingly, has excellent support for handling things with email.
If you’re still concerned about Microsoft and gitHub or if the acquisition served to make you want an alternative, DeVault’s post can help you get started. One downside to that process is that you don’t (automatically) have a central repository that anyone can access: the code is held in a distributed manner. Of course, that’s an easily solvable problem even if you use GitHub as simply a public access point. As DeVault notes, using the Git/Email process works just as well for small projects. If you’re managing a distributed project, you should take a look at DeVault’s post.