I agree with other commenters; I really don't want to talk about my dependencies on twitter to this bot.
if a bunch of people all agree that it's worthwhile to keep a particular project alive, and they're doing the work to make it happen, then they have something in common, and it should be easy for them to meet each other.
Any chance this could be made not to rely on Twitter?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54868988/how-to-determin...
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.
Same problem as stated here, repo owner moved on. Thankfully a few people have contributor access on the main repo so it hasn’t died yet. But I’m likely to go awol on it in the next few months and there’s no clear second in command to hand it to.
I’ve also been working with the GitHub api this weekend and I was wondering how pushed_at and updated_at were differentiated. Good to know re: dependabot
That blog post is the same link for this thread.
> without creating a User model
A User model isn't necessary if you don't require login to use your tool.
- hide any repo that hasn't seen any commits
- show commits ahead and behind as well as number of tags
- include issue tracker activity
- highlight those forks that were renamed which is often an indicator of a new package/gem being released from this fork
- Show a link from the main page of a repository to the most active fork to make it clear that there is an active fork at all.
That still doesn't explain the Twitter dependency. It could just be an attempt to get popular and share the tool at the same time.
I don't see why I should let Twitter know that I'm using this service. Furthermore I should log into Twitter in a browser tab and go there to check if the result arrived. On the other side I understand that it's hard to find a convenient asynchronous delivery mechanism. Email is what everybody has but it's hard to send thousands of emails for free and not to get into a spam list.
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...
see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28984305
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.
You done what now?
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.
