Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazysim | Hacker News Reader

It is a curse that GitHub's code search can't code search forked repositories. If there's a really popular fork of a dead repo, it's code is invisible. Though, I have a feeling that is a technical, not business, limitation.

View on HN

The Network graph has gotten increasingly buried in GitHub UX (currently it is under Insights > Network, at one point I recall it was a top level tab of its own) because it's a very useful power user feature, but can be super confusing to new users. (It's particularly a shame it is so hidden because IMNSHO it is the best commit graph that GitHub has, much more useful than the default commits list on the Code tab.)

The Network graph is extremely useful for getting a sense if a particular fork is dead and if there's a lot of activity happening on another fork (and letting you jump directly to other fork).

Assuming GitHub is willing to show you the graph, for some projects it isn't.

Is that for piracy apps or something?

I've only seen GitHub not show the graph at all when the total fork count for a Repo was huge and they've since changed it to always try to show "top 100 most recently committed forks" instead as a performance optimization in that case.

Easiest example off the top of my head: https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/network

I suspect it’s largely to avoid ballooning the size of indexed search data they have to store, given the many many forks of popular repos. So a mix of biz/tech reasons, but not really nefarious.

That said, given the nature of git, I usually just fall back to clone/grep.

I just have the SourceGraph extension installed. It's also usable without too. It's a bit more powerful and lets me search forked repositories too on an instance of Sourcegraph on their infrastructure.

I still lament not being able to globally (like all of GitHub, not just one repo's forks) search GitHub's forks. It's amazingly useful for finding out approaches to using an API. Sorta like Google Code Search in the old days.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Yes, you can search forked repositories on Sourcegraph with regexp, exact terms, etc. Thanks for mentioning that!

Here’s an example of a fork that you can search: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/uber/gonduit

Just change the repository owner/name in the URL to search any other one.

It's nuts. There's so many old JS/node libraries floating around on github, and it's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to find the one that has been moved forward the most in a fork. There should be a notice on a repo that hasn't had commits or any activity from the author in the last 6 months which links to a better fork view than the one they have.

I run a fork, and we didn't use GitHub's "fork" feature for that specific reason. However its pretty trivial to checkout from a repository and push that wholesale into a brand new github repo without forking.

I heard you can also contact support to separate this out too.

It's necessary to preserve issues and pull requests.

Yes, I've done this myself — it's just an email and they "disconnected" the fork within an hour. Very happily and friendlily, too.

It would be awesome if this problem was solved under Microsoft's ownership, it seems like the kind of challenge that could benefit from the resources of a giant firm, and of course promote Azure somehow. Code exactly duplicated from the parent repository could be excluded, so when you're searching Github you'd really be searching all of Github.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com