Fork Freshness: Discover Active Forks of Abandoned GitHub Repositories

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • active-forks

    Find active github forks of a repo https://git.io/vSnrC

  • I ran across this site a few years ago and I've used it since then to find active forks: https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html

  • Better-Github-Forks

    Script for finding good forks of any project on Github

  • I like this bookmarklet [1] that shows how many commits ahead/behind each fork is. There's also this extension [2] but you need to give it your own github access token.

    [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54868988/how-to-determin...

    [2] https://github.com/dragongling/Better-Github-Forks

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  • murder

    Discontinued Large scale server deploys using BitTorrent and the BitTornado library (NOTE: project no longer maintained)

  • Is there a repository for Fork Freshness? I could see the twitter account ignoring requests in the future and the same fate could fall to this project. I would recommend releasing the project under AGPL-3.0-or-later to partially solve this issue so the project can continue in the event of abandonment. I could see people contributing code to search for projects in other known forges such as GitLab, Sourceforge, Savannah, Gitea, pagure, and sourcehut as sometimes projects are forked outside of the original forge.

    I have noticed this issue that Fork Freshness tries to solve. My example is Twitter's project murder https://github.com/lg/murder When a project becomes unmaintained whether officially or unofficially, the future home is often lost unless the original points to the new home at the top of the README file. You can dig within GitHub in the Insights > Network section to get a visual glimpse of what has changed since. https://github.com/lg/murder/network The original repository put up a notice that the project is unmaintained and archived the project which effectively ends the project in practice. In this case, ervinb's fork seems to be the most active commits before being abandoned. https://github.com/ervinb/murder Other forks also had independent commits that never were pulled into other projects. Looking at the network method fails to differentiate 30 grammar fixes from 30 new features without digging into each promising looking fork. Even then, you may miss a single commit that included more work then the entirety of the other commits. Disclosure: I have not worked on murder.

    This is a serious problem and I hope we solve it.

  • murder

    Large scale server deploys using BitTorrent and the BitTornado library (by ervinb)

  • Is there a repository for Fork Freshness? I could see the twitter account ignoring requests in the future and the same fate could fall to this project. I would recommend releasing the project under AGPL-3.0-or-later to partially solve this issue so the project can continue in the event of abandonment. I could see people contributing code to search for projects in other known forges such as GitLab, Sourceforge, Savannah, Gitea, pagure, and sourcehut as sometimes projects are forked outside of the original forge.

    I have noticed this issue that Fork Freshness tries to solve. My example is Twitter's project murder https://github.com/lg/murder When a project becomes unmaintained whether officially or unofficially, the future home is often lost unless the original points to the new home at the top of the README file. You can dig within GitHub in the Insights > Network section to get a visual glimpse of what has changed since. https://github.com/lg/murder/network The original repository put up a notice that the project is unmaintained and archived the project which effectively ends the project in practice. In this case, ervinb's fork seems to be the most active commits before being abandoned. https://github.com/ervinb/murder Other forks also had independent commits that never were pulled into other projects. Looking at the network method fails to differentiate 30 grammar fixes from 30 new features without digging into each promising looking fork. Even then, you may miss a single commit that included more work then the entirety of the other commits. Disclosure: I have not worked on murder.

    This is a serious problem and I hope we solve it.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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