I have to agree that not using pull requests is missing out on the best feature of github. It's the social, low-overhead way to contribute to a repo.
It seems like it must be possible to hook up a bot to github that watches for pull requests and submits them to gerrit... the Juju team has a bot that does that for our Reviewboard integration. It won't work for more complicated workflows that github doesn't support, like dependent branches or whatever, but it lowers the barrier of entry for initial contributors that just want to submit a simple fix. And the more advanced users can just submit directly to our Reviewboard instance if they want the more advanced features.
Also, the public fork on Github is actually a feature - it means others can easily see what you're working on. You need off-site storage for your personal work anyway, right? You're not going to keep it local on your laptop, so you'll need a branch somewhere regardless.
GitHub code review is terrible. I don't blame them for not using pull requests in the least. If not being able to pull is enough to stop people from contributing, how much is their contribution worth?
It seems like it must be possible to hook up a bot to github that watches for pull requests and submits them to gerrit... the Juju team has a bot that does that for our Reviewboard integration. It won't work for more complicated workflows that github doesn't support, like dependent branches or whatever, but it lowers the barrier of entry for initial contributors that just want to submit a simple fix. And the more advanced users can just submit directly to our Reviewboard instance if they want the more advanced features.
Also, the public fork on Github is actually a feature - it means others can easily see what you're working on. You need off-site storage for your personal work anyway, right? You're not going to keep it local on your laptop, so you'll need a branch somewhere regardless.