12 Forks

Rationale

GitHub is great, but sometimes it is difficult to estimate if there are some valuable code in project's forks. Especially for popular project like xxx.

This script build a report with all non merged forks and their commit messages. This allows to read or grep through and find if there are something useful.

Probably, a webservice could be created to automate this precedure.

Usage

Download a binary for your platform from releases page.

Generate a personal access token at GitHub's settings page.

Run it in a shell:

./12forks --token <your-token> marijnh/Postmodern > report.rst

Ideas for webservice

• Service could send a pull request when on new commits to project's forks.
• An image with badge could countain number of non-merged forks and link from this badge should go to the page with full report.
• Service could be configured with simple yaml config file placed inside the repository.
• Some king of gamification engine could be used to praise forks merging.
• Service could remind people who made a fork and having some non merged commits, to send a pull request or delete the fork if it was experimental.
• Embedd this functionality into the GitHub? :)

Donations

This service was started as opensource and nonprofit. Please, donate your time if you wish to support it.

Development

How to start hacking

1. Install roswell and qlot:

   brew install roswell
   ros install qlot
   

2. Create local quicklisp:

   qlot install
   

3. Run emacs:

   qlot exec ros emacs roswell/12forks.ros
   

4. Start slime:

   M-x slime
   

5. Load the system:

   (push (probe-file ".") asdf:*central-registry*)
   (ql:quickload "12forks" :silent t)
   

6. Edit files and run analyze-* functions:

   CL-USER> (in-package :12forks)
   12FORKS> (setf (getf *config* :token) "your-personal-git")
   

How to build binaries for linux

First, you need t build a docker container with roswell:

docker build -t 12forks-roswell .

Then, run:

docker run --rm -ti -v `pwd`:/app 12forks-roswell bash -c 'cd /app && ros build roswell/12forks.ros'

Similar projects

• http://forked.yannick.io but it shows only number of stars/forks/issues and last update time.

TODO

• Make analysis if some fork is popular and another forks are made from it instead of the base.
• Handle networking error like USOCKET:NS-HOST-NOT-FOUND-ERROR gracefully.
• Notify command-line utility's user about rate limit from GitHub and let him choose to fail or to sleep.