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> But if you can make a fork and petition for it to be seen as the "active, maintained" version, it would work a lot better I think. In practice I fear that th

> But if you can make a fork and petition for it to be seen as the "active, maintained" version, it would work a lot better I think. In practice I fear that this would lead to abuse where scammers (or what you want to call them) fork dead projects but then add crypto miners, adware and ransomware to the code and then they create a bunch of dummy commits to make it seem active to automated systems and to people only taking a glance at the project. And all of that can happen already of course, but if you then allow these people to automatically be assigned status of the canonical active maintained version then much more people will end up installing these malware-infested versions of the software.

jerf 5y ago
I think there's a balance between what they show now and what I'd like them to show, for sure. I certainly do not want GitHub to try to declare what an "official" repository is, in any form whatsoever. GitHub simply is not in a position to make that declaration, philosophically, practically, or any other way. On the other hand, the network view, which is the closest thing we have right now, is pretty hard to read for the question of "where are active forks right now"? I just sampled them now to make sure I'm not shooting my mouth off, and I think a major problem is that the graph doesn't have a strong visual difference between an active fork with many commits and contributors and someone who happened to commit something yesterday against an old (perhaps "official" fork), and there doesn't seem to be any sensible sorting that I can make out, either. Plus the UI on that thing is just funky in general; I think I see lines going off the right of some of these networks entirely but I can't seem to scroll right or left. Upshot is, I'd rather they just figured out how to improve that graph, or generally build a "more active forks available here" that can be obtained through a clickthrough, but not have GitHub try to guess at who's "official".

jerf 5y ago

I think there's a balance between what they show now and what I'd like them to show, for sure. I certainly do not want GitHub to try to declare what an "official" repository is, in any form whatsoever. GitHub simply is not in a position to make that declaration, philosophically, practically, or any other way. On the other hand, the network view, which is the closest thing we have right now, is pretty hard to read for the question of "where are active forks right now"? I just sampled them now to make sure I'm not shooting my mouth off, and I think a major problem is that the graph doesn't have a strong visual difference between an active fork with many commits and contributors and someone who happened to commit something yesterday against an old (perhaps "official" fork), and there doesn't seem to be any sensible sorting that I can make out, either. Plus the UI on that thing is just funky in general; I think I see lines going off the right of some of these networks entirely but I can't seem to scroll right or left. Upshot is, I'd rather they just figured out how to improve that graph, or generally build a "more active forks available here" that can be obtained through a clickthrough, but not have GitHub try to guess at who's "official".