Show HN: Find maintained forks of your favorite GitHub repos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find maintained forks of your favorite GitHub repos

forked.yannick.io

87 pointspunnerud17 comments

A user emailed us to complain about this title saying "Show HN" when it isn't the submitter's work. That's an abuse of "Show HN", which is intended to share work that you yourself have made. Please (re-)read the rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I'm sorry. I thought the "Show HN" was for projects people could try out. Will not use it for something I have not made again.

Thanks!

This is cool, but one thing that may be useful is a "last commit" instead of "Last Update". Explaining what is looked at for "last update" that would be great too. Some repos that I follow that are very dead have a very recent "last update" as they are still hammered by people due to being high up in search engine results and linked to from lots of places.

Case in point is http://forked.yannick.io/flot/flot and https://github.com/flot/flot. Dead project with seemingly no active forks, listed being updated 2 month ago. Last commit was in 2014.

I think that the most important missing feature is number of commits of the fork

number of commits on the fork is irrelevant to the stated coal "find MAINTAINED forks..." if you had 400 extra commits, but they were 6 years ago i don't care. it's very unlikely to be a "maintained" fork.

What you'd want is consistency over time together with the most recent commit.

I've been using this extension for a while now which shows similar information inline with the page: https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks

Makes it pretty easy to see at a glance when a project has another fork which is better maintained.

Thanks man, this is something github really doesn't do well. Your contribution may help a lot of projects :)

That's pretty cool. A full-fledged open source project is really about people and communication and sharing ideas, not just pressing a 'fork' button. You need a mailing list, and maybe some kind of chat thing (IRC) as well as what github offers.

I wish github would make it easier to have some kind of "leader election" or something to point out which one is the actual project.

I hate it when I find some project with 192030 forks and 0 coordination of them, it always feels like such a wasted opportunity.

What makes this a fit for Show HN today? This site has been around for a while. Did you make some updates to it or something?

From the Show HN rules [1]:

> New features and upgrades ("Foo 1.3.1 is out") generally aren't substantive enough to be Show HNs. A major overhaul is probably ok.

I haven't figured out what the new changes are, if any.

Are you the same as user yann_ck who originally posted this, or just working with him on it? [2]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6739269

Really cool. If you have popular projects it's great to see what the community is doing with them. http://forked.yannick.io/andreis/interview

On Bitbucket a fork of a Mercurial repo is non publishing by default. It would be neat to see all of the publishing forks which are basically trying to be "maintained forks".

When I enter a repository that has been renamed (e.g. docker/docker or tomaka/glium), I get: "Woops, that developer can't code...". Why so?

karma-runner/karma is still the top result. Doesn't help.

Whoops reading HN without my glasses again— saw "Find marinated forks of your favorite GH repos."

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