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Why do some people fork repos but make no changes to them? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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I've seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn't be for archival purposes, could it?

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[–] 7 points 9 months ago (1 child)

Fork it so i have my version, regardless if the original goes away. (Assuming Github doesn't nuke all repos of course like they did with youtube-dl for a while)

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    GitHub nukes forks when the original repository is deleted. The correct way to handle your use case is by creating pull mirrors, ideally on a different host.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I didn't know this, and I'm sure a lot other people don't know this and that's why they fork - to have their own copy of the repo, thinking they have full control over it.

    I have forked projects in the past and IIRC i had to send a request to be disassociated from the original repo, otherwise all pull requests default to the original repo which is annoying.

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