Encourage forking?

[fabiopelosin]

One of the special ingredients of the GitHub sauce is that it encourages forking.

We could have a common naming convection for forks so people is encouraged to publish them on CocoaPods as well. I'm thinking about something separated by a special character not commonly used but compatible with the files systems out there.

My current idea is:

POD_NAME@AUTHOR.podspec
libPusher@irrationalfab

[blakewatters]

This sounds similar to what Github used to support back in the day when they have a Gem building system before the rise of rubygems.org.

I am somewhat torn by the idea. On the one hand, it would be really nice to be able to push a forked Pod for a library in which the upstream maintainer is failing to publish an official version or merge things in a timely manner rather than having your Podfile be littered with :git => configurations pointing all over Github. On the other hand, as a maintainer of a library myself I worry about the implications of having folks being able to publish pod installable versions of RestKit to the Specs repository. The support burden can be really fierce as is without the meaning of version numbers become radically diluted… (is that RestKit v0.20.3 or SomeRandomDude-RestKit v0.20.3 you have?)

[fabiopelosin]

In the end I think that we should not 'encourage' forks, but having the alternative is good. I any case if a fork is made for convention the above presented syntax should be used.