4 ms·

That said, the is a fork button.

• Wintamute 10y ago
  True, but there are problems with GitHub forking: namely that its often non-obvious which is the best fork to use, since too much prominence is given to the original project. Also if the maintainer doesn't even put a note on the readme "This is dead, use XXX fork" you have even more problems. Also maybe the original project was published to a package manager ... forking is one thing, but publishing and maintaining your fork on a package manager too?
  • mgbmtl 10y ago
    It can take some effort to feel comfortable giving the keys of a project to someone else. In one project that I had abandoned, I encouraged others to fork and rename the project. They can advertise it as a fork of the original project to attract stranded users, I would even have promoted it, but I think that it would have been very misleading to our users if suddenly the project changed hands. (the project was a management tool often used by non-profits, it stored personnal data and security was important. I had received a ton of very shady non-sense proposals, to this day, 10 years later, I still get the occasionnal weird message or request for support)
• caseysoftware 10y ago
  Forking is an approach to keep the project moving but the underlying problem is then notification & distribution. If I use one of the package managers - npm, composer, gems, etc - people only know of the original project and have its namespace somewhere in the project. If I fork a project, resolve all the issues, and make it better, faster, etc, there's not a mechanism for those users to pick up my fork unless they actively go looking for it. I think many of those package managers would be well-served to have a 301-like redirect saying "deprecated, but continued over in this new package"