5 ms·

If owner has abandoned his project why not fork it and fix it yourself?

mindcrime 13y ago
Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. And because your fork, by definition, has diverged from "the mainline" because there really isn't any "mainline" anymore. You might have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100 other people who also forked just to fix one random bug or whatever, but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further. Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.
- christophe971 13y ago
  Perfect answer.
- Sander_Marechal 13y ago
  > but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream. IMO, yes. Providing some kind of mechanism to make it easier to gain cohesion between all the disparate forks is definitely at least part of the answer. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, though, and I don't pretend to have any real concrete suggestion in mind.
- shurcooL 13y ago
  Extremely well put. > Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have. Completely agree.
- smsm42 13y ago
  >>> Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. Yes, with power comes responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, don't ask for the power. >>> but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. If there is enough people interested in the project, that can find one who wants to take maintainership. If they can't, the project doesn't have that much value for them. >>>> It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. I don't see a problem here. If there's a strong community, fork changes naturally gravitate back there due to the advantages of community size. If there isn't, making random people be able to mess with the code base is not going to fix it.
astrodust 13y ago
The idea here is not unlike "squatter's rights". If you abandon a project, other people should be able to take it over and bring it back to life. Forks and forks of forks and forks of forks of forks have the effect of diffusing effort, where the main project has the effect of focusing effort.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I think part of the problem is that GitHub doesn't do a lot to support the "community" around a project. GitHub started off as just a code repository, and while it's grown, there's still - to me - something missing. Then again, I haven't spent much time messing with GitHub pages. So maybe my thinking on this is somewhat outdated. Still, something like Google Code "feels" like it is more "project centric" than "source code centric" if you get what I mean. There's specific places to do things like linking in Google Groups or mailing lists, project blog, Twitter account, etc. And the way it's organized just makes it feel like more of a "project home". Compare: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy with http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/ http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/ Anyway, what I'm getting at is, if GitHub did more to foster a cohesive community around projects, I think it would help with the "abandoned project" thing, since there would be more of a sense of "go here and discuss whose repo is going to become the new mainline" etc.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    I honestly cannot stand Google Code. Seeing a link like that fills me with nearly as much dread as visiting SourceForge. If I click on the source tab, I want to see the source. GitHub gets this right. Google just presents you with boilerplate garbage. No, I don't want to use Subversion. Ever again. Don't even bring it up. The real problem is how user unfriendly Google Code is, where things are compartmentalized arbitrarily and an extraordinary amount of clicking is required to get the information you need. The "groups" feature of that is virtually useless in my opinion. I can't stand typical web forums with their chronological ordering of posts, and even those that are threaded but don't show the thread on one page are infuriating, where many "mailing list" viewers are terrible offenders in this case. You may sift through half a dozen replies only to find the problem is still unresolved. Stack Overflow and GitHub are examples of how to organize the user experience better. Both could improve further, but Google Code seems like a huge regression in most areas.

Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. And because your fork, by definition, has diverged from "the mainline" because there really isn't any "mainline" anymore. You might have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100 other people who also forked just to fix one random bug or whatever, but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further. Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.

christophe971 13y ago
Perfect answer.
Sander_Marechal 13y ago
> but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream. IMO, yes. Providing some kind of mechanism to make it easier to gain cohesion between all the disparate forks is definitely at least part of the answer. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, though, and I don't pretend to have any real concrete suggestion in mind.
shurcooL 13y ago
Extremely well put. > Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have. Completely agree.
smsm42 13y ago
>>> Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. Yes, with power comes responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, don't ask for the power. >>> but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. If there is enough people interested in the project, that can find one who wants to take maintainership. If they can't, the project doesn't have that much value for them. >>>> It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. I don't see a problem here. If there's a strong community, fork changes naturally gravitate back there due to the advantages of community size. If there isn't, making random people be able to mess with the code base is not going to fix it.

astrodust 13y ago

The idea here is not unlike "squatter's rights". If you abandon a project, other people should be able to take it over and bring it back to life. Forks and forks of forks and forks of forks of forks have the effect of diffusing effort, where the main project has the effect of focusing effort.

mindcrime 13y ago
I think part of the problem is that GitHub doesn't do a lot to support the "community" around a project. GitHub started off as just a code repository, and while it's grown, there's still - to me - something missing. Then again, I haven't spent much time messing with GitHub pages. So maybe my thinking on this is somewhat outdated. Still, something like Google Code "feels" like it is more "project centric" than "source code centric" if you get what I mean. There's specific places to do things like linking in Google Groups or mailing lists, project blog, Twitter account, etc. And the way it's organized just makes it feel like more of a "project home". Compare: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy with http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/ http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/ Anyway, what I'm getting at is, if GitHub did more to foster a cohesive community around projects, I think it would help with the "abandoned project" thing, since there would be more of a sense of "go here and discuss whose repo is going to become the new mainline" etc.
- astrodust 13y ago
  I honestly cannot stand Google Code. Seeing a link like that fills me with nearly as much dread as visiting SourceForge. If I click on the source tab, I want to see the source. GitHub gets this right. Google just presents you with boilerplate garbage. No, I don't want to use Subversion. Ever again. Don't even bring it up. The real problem is how user unfriendly Google Code is, where things are compartmentalized arbitrarily and an extraordinary amount of clicking is required to get the information you need. The "groups" feature of that is virtually useless in my opinion. I can't stand typical web forums with their chronological ordering of posts, and even those that are threaded but don't show the thread on one page are infuriating, where many "mailing list" viewers are terrible offenders in this case. You may sift through half a dozen replies only to find the problem is still unresolved. Stack Overflow and GitHub are examples of how to organize the user experience better. Both could improve further, but Google Code seems like a huge regression in most areas.