Let There Be Renaming

Let There Be Renaming

pjhyett 30 Jul 2008

Repositories can be renamed via their edit page.

Users can be renamed via their account page.

That is all.

Comments

bjeanes Wed Jul 30 16:09:31 -0700 2008

oh thank you thank you thank you. let the days of deleting and re-pushing repos be over!

josh Wed Jul 30 17:36:41 -0700 2008

+1 for deleting fork’d repositories

felixge Thu Jul 31 13:02:38 -0700 2008

What about links to the old urls? Will they break?

pjhyett Thu Jul 31 14:18:45 -0700 2008

@felixge yes, use with caution.

mileszs Thu Jul 31 19:39:15 -0700 2008

The ability to rename makes my day.

Be warned, it also reinforces the idea that if I wait around long enough, someone will make it easier for me to accomplish whatever I wanted to accomplish. Maybe you should slow down on the awesomeness, for my sake.

Thanks.

ardekantur Fri Aug 01 07:19:36 -0700 2008

Is there any kind of persistence for `username-repo`-named gems? I would hate for a deployment to fail because the author of a gem I relied on changed their GitHub username.

nakajima Sat Aug 02 00:03:03 -0700 2008

@ardekantur It’d probably be a good idea to fork any gems you rely on. That way, you can control everything, as well as make changes as you see fit.

elliottcable Sun Aug 03 22:09:19 -0700 2008

@nakajima but then you have to maintain the fork, or it gets out of date – not to mention, that’s not really (semantically) the purpose of git forks. They’re for you to make changes that won’t go back to the upstream – hence the name ‘fork’. I really think they should do some sort of persistence, or allow ‘nicknames’ for repositories and make the old name a ‘nickname’ of the old repository.

I think it’s important that this is taken care of somehow or another – if a high-profile project’s owner changes their name, that opens the door for a malicious coder to register that name, create a project of the same name, and distribute code for auto-install that does something malicious. Combine this with the fact that most people (all people?) run gem install under `sudo`… not good.

lukeredpath Mon Aug 04 04:50:11 -0700 2008

My initial thought was: will old project/user URLs work. As you state above, they will not. I then thought, well perhaps its not a big deal but I agree with Elliot – it would be nice to know that projects aren’t going to just go away because somebody has renamed it.

I know it would require archiving old project/usernames, but if you did do ths you could then redirect users to the renamed project URL (being sure to redirect permanently). E.g.:

http://gist.github.com/3876