github network growth

[Skirnir]

Hello everyone,

I was about to type this post about 2 weeks ago, that time github showed ~800 forks. Right now it shows 900 forks. 900 forks of MaNGOS of which close to 99% are more or less useless, guys forking MaNGOS just to have ScriptDev2 integrated, forks that stopped about a week after MaNGOS initial creation etc. pp.

You might think "who the hell cares?" Well I do. Github makes MaNGOS able to use their infrastructure. The give away their traffic, their webspace etc. for free (they didn't even shout at MaNGOS during the DDoS attacks some month ago). All they want is to support opensource software (well and for sure sell some of their bigger git repos ...). Now what can be spotted? Somewhere inside the inner deeps of the internet, a noobish mangos guide exists, showing every user how to setup a github account and how to push a fork and not only shows them, it tells them to do so [1]. This is not just completely useless - as shown above, how many forks actually are of any use - it's even more. It's abuse of an open access resource [2]. 900 forks, well calculate yourself 900 * xxMB. This doesn't just kill the cool feature of the network graph, it even overuses the good will of the free github service. Iirc 100MB are for free, with all MaNGOS forks out there, not all are clearly declared as MaNGOS forks, we're easily way above that limit.

I don't know if MaNGOS team (or the one that owns the github repository) can delete some long abandoned forks or whatsoever. All I see is, within the 1. third of 2010 we will have a network of more than 1000 forks integrating ScriptDev2, ahbot, vehicles branch and others. We need about 10 or 12 forks (with those patches), that are maintained frequently, updated etc. 900 right now are about 890 to much.

I just had to post this else I'd feel bad

maybe think about it and delete some of your not used forks

Regards & thanks for reading

Skirnir

[1] Just like the guides that tell you to do a complete clone every time you compile

[2] In economics you call it tragedy of the commons

[freghar]

All forks do initially share git objects, thus they take up ~0 additional space when created.

Anyway, I actually wrote an email (about a year ago) to github maintainers regarding this issue and the reply was something like "we don't like to delete repos, but excluding them from the network graph is a nice idea" .. well, I guess it was never really implemented.

And yes, I did mention those forks are useless ones without even a single push.

[DasBlub]

i poked them several time in their irc channel. their response was something like they'll look at it 'soon'...

[freghar]

i poked them several time in their irc channel. their response was something like they'll look at it 'soon'...

Their "really very soon" (= "we're working on it") work has taken ~3 months so far and still isn't finished. So I expect "soon" to be "maybe in 2015".

[DasBlub]

actually, they were fast... soon after i asked they added the error message so that there's no graph which does not stop loading

Sorry, this repository's graph is currently too logical awesome to display. We're working on optimizing it. Check back soon.

[Gotisch]

The sad thing about the giant ammount of repos is that it makes it impossible to find good repos where people actually post stuff. Which kinda defies the whole "for learning purposes" because its impossible to learn something from those 0 commit repose ^^

[xeross155]

You can use the network graph thingie to see which ones are updated recently.

[freghar]

You can use the network graph thingie

.... which doesn't work.

[cyrex]

I am one of those that need blame. I would like to know how to remove the branch i made since i only did it to practice using git. Sorry for problems.

[maly32167]

They finally fixed git network graph. Semes like they applied some limitation of branches shown, probably by removing the empty ones. Nice to see it finally working.