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Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

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Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#121

Post by whstl »

I have an interesting but unrelated story about files going away in Github.

Remember when Windows Research source code that was used for teaching in university, and was leaked in the late-aughts, way before Microsoft purchased Github?

I had this code in one private repository called "ms" for more than a decade. It didn't have Git history or anything, it was just some random files, plus the leaked sources.

I totally forgot about it until a last year ago, when I checked, and the code is entirely gone.

I'm now more careful about what I put in private repos. In fact I don't have anything private there anymore...

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#122

Post by naikrovek »

This is how GitHub has always worked, and it's been documented the entire time.

Forks are not just copies of other repos which go on to get their own history (or lack thereof) from that point on. They are linked to the parent repo, and share its visibility. If the parent repo goes private, so does the fork, for example.

There's a parent-child relationship that GitHub creates when you fork a repo using the "Fork" button in the UI. That is how this relationship is created.

This has always been the case with the "Fork" button on github.com. This should not have surprised you.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#123

Post by Vecr »

I'm not sure why people are defending Github on this issue, what if the original repo was a template or something, and your thousands of lines of code is gone because the original template repo removed you as a contributor. If I copy something, I expect where I copied it from to have exactly zero bearing on what happens to my copy. If they have a problem they can serve legal documents, giving everyone time to figure something out with zero data loss.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#124

Post by Dylan16807 »

dboreham wrote: post #56
kitkat_new wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what? Private doesn't imply (common sense) that the original repository has power over any fork.

It does, otherwise github just wouldn't allow forking private repositories. If they did allow that, and retained no control over the forked copy, now you can ride a coach and horses through the access control to a private repo by simply forking it when you have access. My guess is that forking a private repository is a feature github intended to be used where employees or contractors of an enterprise want to fork the…

> If they did allow that, and retained no control over the forked copy, now you can ride a coach and horses through the access control to a private repo by simply forking it when you have access.

...which you can still trivially do if you use git to make the copy. And then your github repo will be immune to this kind of deletion.

So common sense says to me this should act similarly.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#125

Post by naikrovek »

kitkat_new wrote: post #46
gregwebs wrote: post #33

This unfortunately makes sense because it is a private repo. Even if a repo is labeled as being MIT and has an MIT license in it, it still may contain other code of a different license. Github could do better by warning the repo owner when they delete a private repo. Github could ask the repo owner if they want to convert it to public first (a "set it free" option) or otherwise give the option to avoid deleting the f…

"This unfortunately makes sense because it is a private repo." I disagree. I expect a (i.e. my) fork to be independent of the original repository, no matter if it is private or not. It's enough if a fork of a private repository is private then too.

Don't use the "Fork" button in the GitHub UI, then. It is intended for collaboration and establishes and maintains the parent-child relationship of "your fork" and if the parent repo is deleted, so are all forks. If the parent repo is private and goes public, so do all forks. If the parent repo is public and switches to private, so do all forks. This behavior is laid out in docs.github.com and is not secret.

This has been the case on github.com for over a decade, and I am slightly shocked that people don't know this. I guess the root of that is that I am surprised that this has not bitten more people than it has.

People assuming things are a certain way and never checking to verify that are by far the greatest source of "I shot myself in the foot" statements that will ever be known.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#126

Post by Dylan16807 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #111
pavon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned in another post that the company only released a cleaned up version publicly. That cleaned up code which they published is clearly and unambiguously under the MIT license. Any other modifications that were made and not published (including any you made in your fork as an employee) are not automatically licensed as MIT. Your employer holds the copyright to that. They might be fine with those internal cha…

If the private repo had the MIT license in it, then it was licensed with the MIT license, regardless of how widely or publicly the repo was distributed.

That's not true. I can go put the MIT license text in every folder on my computer and it won't actually apply the license to anything.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#127

Post by naikrovek »

evouga wrote: post #107
tux3 wrote: post #7

I think this is under the assumption of "employee has a private fork of the company repo, then leaves, employee should not keep the fork" So when "removed as a collaborator" which apparently includes the original being deleted, you lose access to the main repo and all forks, even yours. As if leaving a company.

This doesn’t make any sense to me. My private forks are * mine* and I most certainly do not want GitHub guessing at whether and when to permanently delete them without my consent. Companies of course have the right to manage access to their proprietary source code, for example by only giving access to corporate accounts under their control and reclaiming those accounts when an employee leaves.

> My private forks are mine

Not if you create them using the "Fork" button in the UI.

Since this behavior has yet again surprised many people, here is the documentation: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#128

Post by neodon »

benatkin wrote: post #58
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea Just a tip: no need to use gitea if you want to replicate a git repository to somewhere else on disk/other disk. Just do something like this: mkdir /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo (cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init) git remote add backup /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo git push backup master And now you have a new repository at /media/run/usb-…

Have you tried running gitea? It's very light on resources, has good documentation, and also defualts to a main branch. It's also very easy to control where all the data is stored, and works well w/ sqlite.

You can change the default default branch on GitHub via https://github.com/settings/repositories>.

I believe new GitHub accounts now have that set to main.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#129

Post by IncRnd »

kitkat_new wrote: post #50
IncRnd wrote: post #27

> Your private repository baobabKoodaa/laaketutka-scripts (forked from futurice/how-to-get-healthy) has been deleted because you are no longer a collaborator on futurice/how-to-get-healthy. > and now it's gone... why? Because it was a private not a public repo.

so what? Private doesn't imply (common sense) that the original repository has power over any fork.

That is the exact meaning, which does seem to be common sense. You can fork from a public, private or internal repo. Public is public and the fork won't get deleted when the repo removes you. Private deletes your fork, since it isn't your repo. Internal requires gated access.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#130

Post by spartanatreyu »

capableweb wrote: post #53
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #13

I have a number of git repos that the original developers deleted - because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea. I think that is how you have to do it - never entrust a service, especially a free one, with your only copy of anything you value. If the YouTube algorithm nukes your account and all your videos, you should be ready to upload them to a new account. Same with anything else digital. My current is standar…

> because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea Just a tip: no need to use gitea if you want to replicate a git repository to somewhere else on disk/other disk. Just do something like this: mkdir /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo (cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init) git remote add backup /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo git push backup master And now you have a new repository at /media/run/usb-…

I did not realise you could set the remote's URL to a local filesystem path.

That opens some interesting possibilities.

Cheers

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