Happened to me multiple times

TxzK@lemmy.zip to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 477 points –
23

Project gets so big and popular that the maintainer no longer has time to maintain it. Goto Step 1

It'd be nice if the original maintainer would let the active fork take over the main name, repo, website, etc. when that happened.

There are a lot of instances where that may not be practical. The maintainer may be indisposed or may be even passed away. Perhaps we shouldn't attach too much significance to the name. Instead, make projects more discoverable and get creative with the names.

The forks could just change their name, so they're more easily found. For example mRemote got pretty much abandoned, so mRemoteNG got created.

Or people give forks better names. For example, I've forked some dotnet6 project, and called the fork {project}-dotnet8 - then when people look thought the fork list on github, it's not 20 forks all with the same name

Yes! Now I get to continue enjoying the fruits of unpaid labor. Even better I’ll be able to complain about every niche issue I have without ever contributing anything. Woohoo!

GitHub > insights> network

yeah though if there are many forks, can't do without using some scripting. Hence I believe you should hard fork if you feel really serious about carrying on a project and/or at least link it in an issue on the original repo