Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 294 posts

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

#191

Post by alerighi »

naikrovek wrote: post #125
kitkat_new wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I see the fork feature useful since for example if you fork a project that is no longer maintained user can search in the forks and find that you are now maintaining it. I've found myself doing it a lot of times.

Regarding forking a private repository with a public repository, it's a corner case for sure. In my opinion it's best to forbid forks of private repositories at all, and forbid to make a repository that has forks private, than to create problems like the one of the user in this topic.

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

#193

Post by alerighi »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #39
agolio wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify the appropriateness of this analogy: This is unexpected behaviour from Github here which may (and has, by the anecdote of OP) cause permanent data loss. Documentation is not good enough, as users should not have been expected to have read the entire documentation.

I guess this is a question of who should have been given further information. For example, whoever at the organization deleted the repo would have been given a very clear warning screen including the number of forks that would be deleted by their action prior to them doing it. On that note, an organization admin can _directly_ delete your private fork without even deleting the source repository if they want. GitHub's…

In my opinion in this case the fork shouldn't be allowed to be created at all. If this is the final effect it's better to inform the user that "no, we don't let you fork the repo". So he could have done it the normal way, clone the repo and push it with another remote, that would have not had this issue.

To this day I thought that the "fork" concept was only a relationship at the level of UI, but as I see it has a logic in it, that is the fork depends on the original repository even for permissions, and that to me is surprising!

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

#194

Post by djur »

devmunchies wrote: post #100
darekkay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I usually don't use the official "fork" feature, but clone and push the repository manually instead. I would like to keep the fork network connection on Github, but I don't want to see my fork deleted because of an error, malice or simply lack of knowledge.

Same. Another reason is I don't like how Github inserts "Forked from ..." in the project name. If your "fork" becomes extremely divergent after a couple years (maybe you had a different vision for the project), you are still stuck with the "Fork from..." sub-header, which basically tells users that they should look at the original. I'm otherwise fine putting attribution in a README.

Right, the entire point of GitHub forks is to make it easier to upstream your local changes to the original repository. If you have no interest in doing that you shouldn't use a fork.

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

#195

Post by djur »

dom96 wrote: post #167

I'm getting a sense like something is not right at GitHub, maybe it's just a coincidence but just in the last week I saw GitHub breaking their CI (causing many runs to fail due to a billing bug), then the checksum tarball issue and now this.

This is how private forks have worked at GitHub forever.

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

#196

Post by shagie »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #32
bastardoperator wrote: post #31

It's not your code or data, it's your previous employers IP and they determine who has access and who doesn't and what licenses do or don't apply. Forks have worked like this for awhile and I consider it a feature, especially in cases like this.

That's not how MIT license works

The MIT license applies to the code that was licensed under the MIT license.

The MIT license does not necessarily extend to other contributions to the project that haven't also been specifically MIT licensed too. Those contributions may be under any (or no) license.

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

#197

Post by alerighi »

rezonant wrote: post #15

I have to assume that the original repository was private when you forked it. If it was public, and then made private, then this should not happen. If the original code was "open source", then why exactly was it in a private repository? Putting "MIT licensed open source" into a private repository is not publishing that source code for the world to use. It sounds like nothing weird happened here other than this compan…

Open source doesn't necessary mean that the code has to be share publicly on the internet, let alone on a GitHub repo! This is a common misconception. You can of course also decide to sell an open source software, that is have other pay you to obtain the software source code with an open source license (of course this person then can share the code, or even sell it to others legally, so it's not commonly done).

I can put a MIT or even a GPL license in a private repository that I have at my company. The meaning is that I don't release the source code, tough if one of my employees wants to take it and use it he can, and he can also decide to share it with other people, or put it on a public repo.

Why I don't want to put the repo public? Maybe I'm just lazy, I don't see too much value in the code, I don't want to write documentation, tests, whatever, I don't consider it of enough value, whatever, still I don't have problems with people that have access to the code that they use it, and share it if they want.

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

#198

Post by djur »

kitkat_new wrote: post #142
IncRnd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. That implies that when a person is removed from the selected audience, they lose access to the private code.

to my private repository, but not their own private repository. like it happens when a public repo goes private: I don't loose access to my fork of the repo but access to the original repo

GitHub doesn't allow you to make a public fork of a private repo, either. When you make a fork of a private repo, the resulting repo is constrained to have no broader access than the original.

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

#199

Post by heleninboodler »

mike_d wrote: post #162
evouga wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Your employment agreement disagrees. Blame the confusion on the blurry line GitHub draws between forking work repos into personal accounts.

> Your employment agreement disagrees.

Er, kinda presumptuous of you (and GitHub), no? None of my private repos, forks of other people's private repos, or other people's forks of my private repos are in any way governed by an employment agreement, and if they were, there's no way for GH to know what that agreement says.

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

#200

Post by djur »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #124
dboreham wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...which you can still trivially do if you use git to make the copy.

If you want to steal code from your former employer it's your business and your legal jeopardy. GitHub can't do anything about that. They can remove access to the copies they're storing for you, though.

GitHub has a weird model where they encourage using the same account for personal and professional work, which causes this kind of ambiguity. From their perspective, there isn't a real difference between forking a private repo and making a private copy of a shared Google doc in your work account.

Post reply on HN