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Github can help with this situation a lot. Yes, people are free to write and abandon whatever they want, but once a library has had hundreds of dependent users,
by harikb 6y ago
Github can help with this situation a lot. Yes, people are free to write and abandon whatever they want, but once a library has had hundreds of dependent users, and the primary repo is abandoned / unmaintained, Github could do a lot to guide dependent users away to a better fork.
Today though, every popular repo has hundreds of forks and there is no easy way to identify forks that are more actively maintained. I understand it is a non-trivial problem, but hopefully Github has the talent to solve this problem.
At the very least they can make it easy to ignore forks where
1. changes have already been merged upline
2. forks that only have cosmetic changes of imports (happens a lot for Go repositories)
This will allow the developer to pass the torch, so to speak, to someone else willing to maintain their own fork.
- dgellow 6y agoYes, that would be really useful. Currently looking evaluating forks can be really a pain.
- Pawamoy 6y agoWhy not checking the contributors instead of the forks? Just pick the most regular ones, or the ones that contributed the most (in number of PRs).
- cellularmitosis 6y agoAt scale, how do you tell the difference between software which is finished vs software which is unmaintained?
- chadlavi 6y ago"Finished software" is a myth.
- cellularmitosis 6y agoThough I love a good fatalistic Jamie Zawinski reference, I’ll resist and stay on-topic. I think you mean “for the kind of software I typically get paid to write, software is never finished.” However, if you widen your perspective a bit, you’ll find plenty of examples. I assure you, “space invaders” was finished in 1978, and it will never see any “maintenance”.
- chadlavi 6y agoI mean yeah, every piece of commercially available software got shipped at some point, and especially before the internet that software was mostly done being changed forever. That doesn't mean it was finished!
- wizzwizz4 6y agoI don't know… true seems pretty finished to me.
- account42 6y agoHeck, GitHub could stard with filtering out "forks" that don't have any changes at all.