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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

#251

Post by slikrick »

djur wrote: post #194
devmunchies wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you know you can fork dead and abandoned projects right?

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

#252

Post by Ennea »

kadoban wrote: post #237
jefftk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also shows the right way to delete a private repo if you want people to be able to keep their forks: If a private repository is made public, each of its private forks is turned into a standalone private repository and becomes the upstream of its own new repository network. Private forks are never automatically made public because they could contain sensitive commits that shouldn't be exposed publicly. If a priv…

The right way is to make it public first? That's insanity. Making a repo public just to delete it would be a huge information leak even if it was short in duration.

Just force push something very empty to it before making it public. One more step, yay..

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

#253

Post by snowwrestler »

madduci wrote: post #248
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.

So the main solution would be not forking, but cloning and straight create a separate project? Will it work?

Simply saving a copy of the fork locally would be sufficient to keep a copy of it.

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

#254

Post by hgsgm »

nobody9999 wrote: post #61

I completely understand your frustration. It's a dick move to delete your content without (at least) giving you a chance to archive that work. At the same time this situation points up an important issue: if you don't own/control the infrastructure where your data lives, you don't own that data. Full stop. If you host your data "in the cloud" (i.e., on someone else's servers ) then you don't own that data, or at leas…

OP specifically asked GitHub to keep the code private!

It's silly to be upset about that, after refusing to make any backups or distribute any copies of this "publicly licensed" software.

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

#255

Post by bunbun69 »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #57
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…

GitHub is not supposed to make such decisions for the user here. It is user's responsibility to make sure they delete their private forks if they shouldn't have access to the repo/fork anymore. What's next? Should we all install spyware on our computers and let GitHub automatically delete local copies of forks as well? GitHub and the company/person, who deleted the original private repo, should inform the owner of th…

Seems like you don't like GitHub. Have you considered not using it?

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

#256

Post by hgsgm »

sshine wrote: post #147
andybak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. But at the same time - who doesn't have local copies of anything they care about? What are they thinking!?

You’d be surprised at how many use GirHub as their remote code backup platform. Having private file system backups is a question of culture, and a lot don’t have it.

If no one has a copy of the software, does it really exist?

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

#258

Post by drudoo »

kitkat_new wrote: post #145
sangnoir wrote: post #136

If you have a Raspberry Pi wasting away in a drawer[0], I strongly recommend installing Gitea or Forgejo and mirroring all the repos you like (i.e. the ones you contribute(d) to and/or starred, not just on Github too!). You set it up once and it will sync in upstream changes as often as you like (default is daily) 0. Or a homelab, or a cheap 256MB VM, or a NAS that can run docker containers, or an old Chromebook: any…

I'll look for a tool that mirrors all my repositories (i.e. only forks). If I can't find one, I'll write it myself.

This is build in to Gitea. I mirror multiple github repos to my private gitea instance.

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

#259

Post by kevincox »

madduci wrote: post #248
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.

So the main solution would be not forking, but cloning and straight create a separate project? Will it work?

Yes, I believe that if you push a repo to GitHub from a local copy instead of using their web-based "fork" feature it will not deduplicate the repositories. IDK if this affects your ability to submit pull requests though.

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

#260

Post by kevincox »

theturtletalks wrote: post #134
Vecr wrote: post #123

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…

Guess I’ll be cloning repos locally and then pushing instead of forking.

Apparently this removes you ability to open Pull Requests.
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