I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn’t be for archival purposes, could it?
One reason I can think off the top of my head is archiving: Nothing prevents the owner of a repo from simply deleting it.
While true and some will do it for that reason, I bet most do it simply because the friction to forking is so low.
Some might have an intention to work on it but then don’t or might start looking at it in detail then give up or get to busy or lose interest.
Others might just click it to save it for later.
And don’t forget all the people that click it by accident.
It’s not like it is a big investment to click the button.
“Mmm this looks neat”
Puts in pocket for later
This is exactly what I do… and then never touch it again.
I’m getting to it! It’s on my to do list, with the 13,572 other projects I’m working on :(
In my personal workflow, I fork GitHub and Codeberg repos so that my local machine’s “origin” points to my fork, not to the main project. And then I also create an “upstream” remote to point to the main project. I do this as a precursor before even looking at a code on my local machine, as a matter of course.
Why? Because if I do decide to draft a change in future, I want my workflow to be as smooth as possible. And since the norm is to push to one’s own fork and then create a PR from there to the upstream, it makes sense to set my “origin” to my fork; most established repos won’t allow pushing to a new topic branch.
If I decide that there’s no commit to do, then I’ll still leave the fork around, because it’s basically zero-cost.
TL;DR: I fork in preparation of an efficient workflow.
Fork repo, make local changes intending to push to fork for PR, never push anything. Very common.
Also, SO MANY SITES have the button that says “Fork me on GitHub!” that is often wonder if people think it’s something that it isn’t.
When looking for activity, are you only checking for the number of commits ahead/behind, or are you also checking for new branches?
A common workflow is to fork a project, clone it locally, add some work on a new branch, push it to your fork, and then create a pull request from the new branch. None of that will add commits to the default branch.
Maybe some people don’t delete the fork after their PR is done.
In my case, I found another explanation.
Sometimes, a random person comes and forks one of my repos. I check their profile, and it’s a techbro student with hundreds of forked repos without any commits. With their bio referencing AI or some shit.
I’m pretty sure these people fork a lot of repos just to pad their CV or something. Make it look like you have a lot of repos. Because when you go to someone’s profile, it is not clear that a repo is a fork instead of their own creation.
When you visit someone’s profile on github it defaults to
source. It won’t show forks at all for a ‘normal’ visitor to a profile. You have to explicitly clear the filter to see forks.Maybe they changed the defaults. I stopped using GitHub after they trained their AI over private repos.
But I remember clearly that I was annoyed when looking at my own repos because my forks (for actually doing PRs) would show at the top instead of my own repos.
It’s been that way for many years, I’d say at least 4 or 5? Long before all this ai nonsense.
yeah, makes sense. The cynical part of my mind also led me to your 2nd explanation. :)
Sometimes I fork to make changes locally, but they’re either me-specific or hacky garbage I don’t want to publish. Because of that, I normally don’t commit those changes, and definitely don’t push to GitHub or make a PR.
Fork it so i have my version, regardless if the original goes away. (Assuming Github doesn’t nuke all repos of course like they did with youtube-dl for a while)
GitHub nukes forks when the original repository is deleted. The correct way to handle your use case is by creating pull mirrors, ideally on a different host.
I didn’t know this, and I’m sure a lot other people don’t know this and that’s why they fork - to have their own copy of the repo, thinking they have full control over it.
I have forked projects in the past and IIRC i had to send a request to be disassociated from the original repo, otherwise all pull requests default to the original repo which is annoying.
You can simply
git cloneon your system andpushit to whatever other remote you want. It should not be associated to the origin in that way.
I wanted to learn github.
Maybe I was trying to click the watch button and missed.
I’ve forked before when I needed a specific version easily stored somewhere, like a Node package. Or if I intended to make changes but didn’t have write access. Or I wanted to save a repository in a way where I can easily find it in my repo list. But more often than not, I intended to pull down the code and contribute to it but for one reason or another didn’t.
Heh, guilty. Pretty much always something where I had an ambition to make a change but got distracted or didn’t have time to work on it.
We want to make changes but can’t find time.
What do you think that people should be doing instead? What is your own workflow when contributing to projects on GitHub?
OP is referring specifically to those who don’t contribute but fork anyway.
How could anyone possibly know that those people don’t contribute? Why would anyone even try finding that information?
you compare the number of forks with the number of contributors
forks are almost always higher, not just higher, but often by a factor of 10
that is just people that got their commits in, it doesn’t mean that others didn’t try to contribute, but failed.
I’d do a PR. Although I would understand forking if the project maintainers wouldn’t merge a PR. (or create an issue (for the fix/ addition) if the README says that it’s an option)
So while you’re working on your PR, where do you push your commits? If you don’t fork, you can’t push them to Github. You don’t have access to the repo you’re making a PR for. That’s exactly why people fork.
Of course you could just NOT push any commits, but then your commits only exist locally on your development machine, and if you have a hardware failure you’ve lost them, defeating the point of a distributed version control system. Or you could push them to another computer you have access to, but Github lets you push to your own free account for free, so most people would rather just do that. Which they do. By creating a fork.
Maybe it’s okay if you’re only creating a small PR with a single commit or two. But for more extensive development, anyone reasonable is going to create a fork so they have somewhere to store their work until it’s ready. Once/If the PR is merged, the fork is abandoned as it’s no longer needed. But that’s why they exist.
A PR requires push access… That’s why you create a fork… So you can create a PR from your fork.
You generally have to fork to create a PR…
