this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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What is the point of empty forks? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by sirdorius@programming.dev to c/git@programming.dev
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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?

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve forked a couple projects that I just wanted a copy of in case the upstream is deleted.

[–] thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't you clone a previous build? Actual noob here, serious question

[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sim642@lemm.ee 28 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Luci@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago

In my case, it's a TODO list. But often, life gets in between and I forget.

[–] Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Tbf forks should be separated in the repo view on GitHub from repos you've created