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Usually there are lots of forks on github because for some reason the Github UI has always led people to think that they should fork a repo even when they don't
by da39a3ee 6y ago
Usually there are lots of forks on github because for some reason the Github UI has always led people to think that they should fork a repo even when they don't plan on contributing to it. This is also true of the "Fork me on Github" banner that has been around for years -- nearly all the people who click on it don't need to fork, they just want to leave a star or look at the README or something. Empirically I believe that for the majority of github users it is the case that the majority of "their repos" are forks with no added commits.
- frou_dh 6y agoYeah, "Fork" as brandished by GitHub Inc is really a misnomer. We already have a verb meaning to duplicate a git repo into your own space: Clone !! So that button action in GitHub's web UI is really "(Cloud) Clone".
- gruez 6y agoI can imagine it getting confusing for beginners: "so start off by cloning this repo... no not using github, using git"
- frou_dh 6y agoThat's true and I know from experience that when teaching people about git, the distinction between git/GitHub can be hard to grasp. Personally though, I found it very helpful to understand that a GitHub repo is just another node on a graph, and isn't really a more grandiose thing than a node/repo that's on one's own hard drive.