So GitHub is apparently so bad at presenting repositories and forks that there are busy beavers running around asking “is this maintained” and reporting to some

So GitHub is apparently so bad at presenting repositories and forks that there are busy beavers running around asking “is this maintained” and reporting to some registry or something if they apparently aren’t. - Anyone know this guy? - Has he logged on in the last year? - Can someone contact his aunt in Xinjiang? Maybe she knows something I experienced the same thing with a repository that wasn’t active. I mean a repository might be feature complete so why should it be active? Well other people wanted more from the repository. But not the author apparently. That’s fine. Well turns out that there was an active fork which was vastly more “featureful” by design. And a PR to that repository took less than three hours to be merged. How did I find that fork? Honestly I think it was mostly by coincidence since I saw the fork owner posting on some issue in the original repository. Spacemacs was experiencing a reviewer bottleneck for a while (I don’t know what the status is now) in part because the repository owner was not very active. That got partly solved by more people getting commit rights apparently. But why don’t forks pick up the slack instead of waiting around for commit rights? Hijack the PRs and review them in your own forks. Merge them if they are good. Then come back to the upstream and ask the main guy to merge them. If he trusts you and would have given you commit rights anyway then it shouldn’t be a problem. GitHub should prominently tell you about other forks if they are notable in some way: - More activity (most important) - Maybe more stars Because then you don’t have to hope to God that the repository owner logs on every two weeks and keeps his thirty repositories updated about their maintenance status. (Honestly who doesn’t have dusty old code that works for them which you haven’t even thought about for months or years?) Why is this so difficult? All repositories are peers after all.