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

Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

gilesbowkett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#11

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

exciteabletom wrote: post #10

This problem could be solved if Github simply sorted the list of forks by stars instead of alphabetically.

More active repos don't necessarily have more stars, maybe a better way to sort would be to have main repo followed by number of commits ahead, then number of commits behind. Most often what I find is a repo will have 3-5 dozen forks and the vast majority will either be far behind or have one or two localizations. It is very rare that I find something that someone has really forked and started doing active development on.

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#12

Post by bredren »

Repo abandonment is a problem compounded by gaps in assignment of package publishing rights.

Recently, I helped a maintainer get a PEP 541 request done after a year of people intermittently pleading with the owner to do a release. It took pypi’s direct communication of potential reassignment for the owner to respond and they did so within two hours.

Not every package has a willing maintainer to back up an owner like this. So finding forks that have sufficiently merged PRs or have even gone off to do new work can be valuable to avoid duplication.

I’ve done this kind of girl research manually before, searching for something that goes the furthest and seems the most professional.

I’d like to see this tool integrate directly into the GitHub forks page, though, ideally as a browser extension.

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#14

Post by Igelau »

bredren wrote: post #12

Repo abandonment is a problem compounded by gaps in assignment of package publishing rights. Recently, I helped a maintainer get a PEP 541 request done after a year of people intermittently pleading with the owner to do a release. It took pypi’s direct communication of potential reassignment for the owner to respond and they did so within two hours. Not every package has a willing maintainer to back up an owner like…

> I’ve done this kind of girl research manually before, searching for something that goes the furthest and seems the most professional.

You done what now?

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#15

Post by unityByFreedom »

phreack wrote: post #5

I usually just use https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html Any chance this could be made not to rely on Twitter?

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

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#16

Post by ronsor »

Igelau wrote: post #14
bredren wrote: post #12

Repo abandonment is a problem compounded by gaps in assignment of package publishing rights. Recently, I helped a maintainer get a PEP 541 request done after a year of people intermittently pleading with the owner to do a release. It took pypi’s direct communication of potential reassignment for the owner to respond and they did so within two hours. Not every package has a willing maintainer to back up an owner like…

> I’ve done this kind of girl research manually before, searching for something that goes the furthest and seems the most professional. You done what now?

Presumably the poster means "grunt"

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#17

Post by trinovantes »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #11
exciteabletom wrote: post #10

This problem could be solved if Github simply sorted the list of forks by stars instead of alphabetically.

More active repos don't necessarily have more stars, maybe a better way to sort would be to have main repo followed by number of commits ahead, then number of commits behind. Most often what I find is a repo will have 3-5 dozen forks and the vast majority will either be far behind or have one or two localizations. It is very rare that I find something that someone has really forked and started doing active developmen…

I think sorting forks by most recent commit would good enough. Not sure why GitHub doesn't do more to help with discoverability

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#18

Post by paulryanrogers »

ronsor wrote: post #16
Igelau wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve done this kind of girl research manually before, searching for something that goes the furthest and seems the most professional. You done what now?

Presumably the poster means "grunt"

Swipe typos have made detection more complex.

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#19

Post by tessierashpool »

phreack wrote: post #5

I usually just use https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html Any chance this could be made not to rely on Twitter?

hi! I made Fork Freshness. that alternative is much faster, but it relies on the `pushed_at` attribute from the GitHub REST API. I was unable to find documentation for that attribute, but I rejected the GraphQL equivalent, `pushedAt`, because if Dependabot pushes to an otherwise dead repo with a PR to auto-update some dependency, `pushedAt` treats that as recent work. I didn't want to write a robot which chased another robot around in a circle, so Fork Freshness instead uses its own much more labor-intensive system. it's much slower, but I believe it's also more accurate.

I wrote that up here, in a fairly gigantic blog post:

https://gilesbowkett.com/blog/2021/08/15/fork-freshness-proj...

that blog post also explains why I based the UI around Twitter. TLDR: fun experiment. re the question of making the UI work in a different way, TLDR: maybe.

part of the experiment was just to see how far I could get without creating a User model. but since Fork Freshness does a relatively slow analysis, I wanted to use an asynchronous UI. I'm not married to it, though, I could see good arguments for setting it up to work differently.

edit: btw, thanks for the discussion re my project! I'm late for a concert and travelling tomorrow morning but I can't wait to dig into these comments some more.

Re: Fork Freshness: Project lifespans in the Ruby ecosystem

#20

Post by tessierashpool »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #9
jccalhoun wrote: post #4

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

Nice. I wonder whether the posted tool offers any more data since this tool is instantaneous and the posted one is slow. It would be great to know, for example, "commits ahead of". EDIT: found a few! [1] is easiest to use. For [2] you need to give it a github access token. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54868988/how-to-determin... [2] https://github.com/dragongling/Better-Github-Forks

it does! although the reason I use a different strategy is not for more data, but for better data.

see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28984305

Post reply on HN