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Find maintained forks for your favorites GitHub Repos

forked.yannick.io

78 pointsyann_ck24 comments

I wish this were a Github feature. Active forks of repositories aren't that easily discoverable, even the network graph isn't always a help.

An open source project is a human thing. Github forks and stuff are neat, but to have a real project, some coordination is necessary, and I really wish that Github would provide more tools to encourage this. It's really dismaying to see some project with 2343232 forks, many of which are newer than the 'main' one, and see little to no coordination between them.

I believe the best tool Github could provide to encourage this would be to make forks subsidiary to the project they're forked from.

The solution would involve some kind of communication and perhaps a way of electing a 'leader'. I don't claim that it's a particularly easy problem to solve, but it seems to have been done when people just used a mailing list and cvs, so it is possible...

> I don't claim that it's a particularly easy problem to solve, but it seems to have been done when people just used a mailing list and cvs, so it is possible...

It worked back when we had a mailing list, CVS, and a web page because a single individual or set of individuals owned the top-level project infrastructure associated with the name in question.

Github broke that model by making forks largely non-subsidiary to the projects they fork. They exist at the same namespace, they have independent bug tracking, wikis, and author information.

This breaks the social economy of contribution that previously existed; even if you choose to not participate in Github, your project will be forked hundreds of times via published Github-based mirrors that look like every other top-level copy of the project.

Yes, I have the readme be the same everywhere... uff!

I think that is important a distinction between a full fork and a "I do a single fix" fork... but how?

I made something similar to this but used bubble charts: http://www.toddsifleet.com/projects/github-forks

Much more useful!

Show some of the details sooner if possible (hover?) and you've pretty much solved the problem.

I will add a better metric than simply the stars this week end. Do you think of something you really want to have for a metric?

Thanks for following up; I'm not the perfect person to ask but it would make sense to allow all the metrics to be specified as sort criteria. Here are a few ideas:

  * number of forks
  * days since last commit
  * ratio of open to closed issues
  * days since commiter response to issue

Definitely copy the default / demo repo implemented by the OP too.

Thanks! If you click on a bubble you get a pop up with more info.

Nice one too!:)

Commits-since-fork might be a better measure than stars, e.g. most of the starred forks of brianfrankcooper/YCSB have no commits more recent than the mainline.

Yes, I'm actually trying to figure out a better metric.

Nice site - it has the potential to be easier to use than the github graph. It would be nice to see how many commits the forks have ahead of their parent, or something like that.

I'm thinking of a way to give a better view of the forks. with a lot of different aspects of the repo

Awesome, thanks for this, Agreed on the commits (vs just stars).

Thanks, this is a useful complement to github's network graph. The ability to sort repos by last update would make it even nicer IMO.

Yes it is an asked thing and will be done this week end:)

Neat - I would love to see/read about how that's determined (especially for repos with many or few forkers/contributors)

For the moment it is as simple as using the stars from GitHub. I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if people want more or not. And now, I'll try to enhance the rate algorithm.

Does not seem to work when I try "mrdoob" or "three.js" or "three"... nice idea, if it worked.

You have to put username/repo like jquery/jquery or ys/chekku

Nice. Ability to sort (stars or last update) would be neat.

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