from Hacker News

Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

by aazaa on 10/25/21, 12:54 AM with 36 comments

  • by joshuanapoli on 10/25/21, 2:06 AM

    Fork Freshness is poking at an important problem. If the author of an open source project stops responding, then there is usually no obvious way for the project's community to reorganize or recognize a new leader or a replacement for the project.

    I agree with other commenters; I really don't want to talk about my dependencies on twitter to this bot.

  • by phreack on 10/25/21, 1:51 AM

    I usually just use https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html

    Any chance this could be made not to rely on Twitter?

  • by exciteabletom on 10/25/21, 2:23 AM

    This problem could be solved if Github simply sorted the list of forks by stars instead of alphabetically.

  • by TheFreim on 10/25/21, 1:02 AM

    Is there a reason this requires a Twitter account? Seems like something I'd like to use but I don't have Twitter.

  • by jccalhoun on 10/25/21, 1:50 AM

    I ran across this site a few years ago and I've used it since then to find active forks: https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html

  • by bredren on 10/25/21, 2:30 AM

    Repo abandonment is a problem compounded by gaps in assignment of package publishing rights.

    Recently, I helped a maintainer get a PEP 541 request done after a year of people intermittently pleading with the owner to do a release. It took pypi’s direct communication of potential reassignment for the owner to respond and they did so within two hours.

    Not every package has a willing maintainer to back up an owner like this. So finding forks that have sufficiently merged PRs or have even gone off to do new work can be valuable to avoid duplication.

    I’ve done this kind of girl research manually before, searching for something that goes the furthest and seems the most professional.

    I’d like to see this tool integrate directly into the GitHub forks page, though, ideally as a browser extension.

  • by thomzane on 10/25/21, 4:19 AM

    Is there a repository for Fork Freshness? I could see the twitter account ignoring requests in the future and the same fate could fall to this project. I would recommend releasing the project under AGPL-3.0-or-later to partially solve this issue so the project can continue in the event of abandonment. I could see people contributing code to search for projects in other known forges such as GitLab, Sourceforge, Savannah, Gitea, pagure, and sourcehut as sometimes projects are forked outside of the original forge.

    I have noticed this issue that Fork Freshness tries to solve. My example is Twitter's project murder https://github.com/lg/murder When a project becomes unmaintained whether officially or unofficially, the future home is often lost unless the original points to the new home at the top of the README file. You can dig within GitHub in the Insights > Network section to get a visual glimpse of what has changed since. https://github.com/lg/murder/network The original repository put up a notice that the project is unmaintained and archived the project which effectively ends the project in practice. In this case, ervinb's fork seems to be the most active commits before being abandoned. https://github.com/ervinb/murder Other forks also had independent commits that never were pulled into other projects. Looking at the network method fails to differentiate 30 grammar fixes from 30 new features without digging into each promising looking fork. Even then, you may miss a single commit that included more work then the entirety of the other commits. Disclosure: I have not worked on murder.

    This is a serious problem and I hope we solve it.

  • by blendergeek on 10/25/21, 1:25 AM

    Does this product find forks that don't use Github's "fork" feature?

  • by throwaway81523 on 10/25/21, 2:32 AM

    This should be called something involving "farm to fork".