It's really no wonder why people don't contribute to open source when this is the first response.

And if someone previously uninvolved with your work showed up one day and dumped a few weeks of a teams work in your lap in one giant patch that affected most of your codebase, you'd say thanks and look to merging it in rather than talk about proper process?

Most projects have a process and gigantic monolithic patches that include entire new projects and "cleanup" updates to core all wrapped up in one are unmanaged and unmergable. It's for the sake of process.

Of course I'd prefer they work in a way which meshes with existing process, but I'm not going to act dismissive and sigh if someone goes another way. If someone removed the GIL from CPython and gave me a context diff, for one I would barely be able to read that format, but I'd find a way to make it work.

Pull requests are great, but it's not like someone couldn't apply the patch and give them a hand - earlier in the thread someone did just that.

Except they're not a person contributing in his free time, they're Microsoft, working exclusively on their own interest.

Yeah, I suppose they could have printed it out and mailed it in.

A comment at TFA by benatkins has a nice answer:

they probably mainly want feedback from the project maintainers at this stage, and the project maintainers can apply a patch just about as easily as they could apply a pull request. (It's so big that the web view isn't likely to be useful.) Also this will probably be going into a new branch if anywhere, so does a pull request to an existing branch (which is all that's possible AFAIK) even make sense?

can someone please submit a patch to MS to add git pull support to team foundation server or visual sourcesafe (or what are MS guys using these days as version control?)

I think they use Perforce (or at least, a heavily patched version they can "Source Depot"). That might have changed since Team Foundation was brought out. I don't think they ever used visual sourcesafe.

I'm in Office and we currently use Source Depot, which is a modified version of Perforce. We have so many tools that interoperate with it (and everyone knows how it works) that I don't see us moving away from SD anytime soon.

We use Team Foundation for a few other things related to project management (personally, I'm not a fan), but not for source control.

You might want to check out git tfs. As someone working in a company that relies on tfs I'm going to do the same to keep my sanity..

That was my first thought too. :)