Git @programming.dev sirdorius @programming.dev 1 yr. ago

What is the point of empty forks?

I see this so often, but I don't understand it. Some people just fork a huge amount of repos and never commit anything to them. What's the point? Are they trying to pad their profile for potential employers or what?

It just clutters your active repos. Personally, I just remove forks once my PR gets merged upstream. And I only fork when I'm ready to push a commit.

Is there something I'm missing?

11 comments

I’ve forked a couple projects that I just wanted a copy of in case the upstream is deleted.
- this is my reasoning also
- Can't you clone a previous build? Actual noob here, serious question
  
  I’m not sure what you mean, but if someone deletes their GitHub repo, there’s no way to fork it. If you forked it before they deleted it, then your fork remains.
They might not have always been empty. Could be that there was a branch for a PR that got merged, so the branch was deleted.
I fork the version I deploy in prod across multiple machines. I find it makes my life easier and I never need to learn any cli other than git clone and git pull.
If it’s licensed well then it means the user has a backup of the project if it ever gets removed or they change the license. I don’t know if that’s the actual reason though, just a guess
In my case, it's a TODO list. But often, life gets in between and I forget.
@sirdorius Some use it to have a list of interesting or depending projects. Instead of a list of URLs or local clones.
- Why not use stars in this case?
  
  @sirdorius I only can speak for myself. I used stars (at GitHub) to shoe that I know and appreciate the project. Like a Star at Twitter or Like at YouTube, etc. I used Forks at GitHub to have a list of projects I'm interested in.
  
  I nowadays would use a list of URLs, e.g. bookmarks.
Tbf forks should be separated in the repo view on GitHub from repos you've created

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