Forking forked GitHub Repo fails

[froboy]

Bug description

Trying to publish a branch to a public GitHub repo you do not have privileges to correctly triggers the "Create Fork" flow, but then forking fails with Git: remote upstream already exists.

Logs report:

[info] > git remote rename origin upstream [2ms]
[info] error: remote upstream already exists.

I also tried to manually remove the upstream before the process with git remote remove upstream but git remote -v reports the upstream remains no matter how I try to remove it.

Steps to reproduce

• Spin up a GitPod instance on a forked repo (such as https://github.com/YCloudYUSA/yusaopeny_docs)
• Create a new branch
• Click "Publish Branch" in the Source Control panel
• Click "Create Fork" when prompted
• Observe the error.

Workspace affected

No response

Expected behavior

If an upstream exists, either the new one should have a new name or the existing upstream should be removed.

Example repository

https://github.com/YCloudYUSA/yusaopeny_docs

Anything else?

No response

[froboy]

Workaround for this is manually creating the fork and adding it via git remote add... but that requires extra steps which might be challenging for a novice contributor.

[axonasif]

Hi @froboy, can you reproduce this on VSCode Desktop? (assuming that you're using Gitpod on VSCode Web)

[froboy]

@axonasif yes, it looks like the same behavior in VSCode Desktop:

Also just for kicks I cloned the repo locally and the upstream isn't there automatically, so it does seem related to something going on in GitPod.

[axonasif]

Thank you for sharing your findings 🙏

Since it's on the IDE team inbox, @andreafalzetti, can you please help to move this issue forward? (maybe escalating it to some other team if IDE doesn't own this)

[jeanp413]

@aledbf is not possible to remove upstream remote git remote remove upstream it gets added automatically again, is this related to GitInitializer in content-service?

[aledbf]

@jeanp413 that is done here and is really old. I don't have enough context for the reason for that.
ping @csweichel

[jeanp413]

ah sorry, it's the GitHub PR extension who's doing it 🤦

[mustard-mh]

Hi @froboy 👋

Close as we found that it's a known issue upstream (built-in github extension). But once you try to rename or remove remote upstream, it will be added again by Github PullRequest extension (issue microsoft/vscode-pull-request-github#4209)

Feel free to reopen it 🙏

cc @akosyakov @jeanp413