Fork me, I'm Famous

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6 points·ncrovatti··4 comments

Those are all important projects, I wish they'll continue to remain a standard and not broken up by different people and different implementations. Having said that, I don't want to discourage people to fork projects, it's a great way to learn.

Yeah, I had a back and forth a while ago with one of the github guys about this issue... it's great that you can fork stuff so easily, but people don't want to compare 343243 sort-of complete, hacked up versions of some project, they want one place to go to to get the code, and be reasonably sure that they're getting the focus of development efforts.

I don't think it's really an either/or choice. You can have loads of forks on Github but still have a central place for those who just want to download code. I think the really cool thing about Github is that it makes it easy to experiment with the code in public. It also makes it very easy to collect up any changes other people have made and integrate them into a single tree.

It will be interesting to see what happens with these projects. Hopefully there will be a few forks as people try things out then one person (or group of people) will step forward to manage an "official" release. Presumably that person would set up a website for them (or take over the existing one) and not use the Github project as the sole means of distribution.

I hope it works out. If things go well, it may take place as you suggest... I think it's too early to tell, though.

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