I think it's only fair that the original repo should be the
most promoted one. Usually, the original author has put a
lot of thought and effort into coming up with the idea and
turning it into a popular open source project.OP brings up the example of a project where the original repo shouldn't be the most promoted one, because it's been abandoned, while plenty of other repos are still alive. I blogged about the same thing earlier this month and used the same example.
if you haven't encountered this problem, you will. it is absolutely a problem every developer will encounter. it's only a matter of time.
somebody starts a great project, doesn't have time to keep it alive, and the community fractures because GitHub has no way to differentiate between "original repo" and "canonical repo."
not going to rant about this because I already did in a blog post: https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150610-thought-experimen...
If an 'owner' no longer feels up to the task of
managing their project, GitHub lets them transfer it to someone else. That's what happened with ExpressJS and it
worked out fine.
this is a ludicrous statement. the Express.js transfer of ownership was a ridiculous fiasco full of angry drama, hurt feelings, and core developers resigning from the project.
documented here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-bizarre-bazaar-...
also, the idea that you can solve this problem by having the original owner transfer ownership doesn't make any sense. the whole problem is that the original owner isn't paying attention at all, doesn't care in the first place, and wouldn't know who to transfer ownership to, if they did care.
it happens all the time.