this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

yo but tbh this gets old.

i just want my stuff to update without me having to find out a year later its unmantained and had a fork all along.

or having to watch the repositories of stuff i use for signs it might be unmantained. i didnt know half the (popular!) stuff mentioned here was abandoned then forked.

libforknotifier when (or even how)?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, it would be nice if it was easier for devs to just turn over the project to an "official" fork. Unfortunately, I'm sure that would get abused by scammers taking over projects forcefully and adding in malware before anyone notices.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You're spot on with the latter, I've come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it's then loaded up with malware or even just instantly abandoned again because the new owner just wants it on their GitHub to get a job or something.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it's then loaded up with malware

See: The Great Suspender

The original developer sold the repo to a new, anonymous maintainer. The new maintainer abandoned the repo but continued updating the Chrome Web Store version of the addon. That version eventually got delisted by Google for including malware.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I am pretty sure you can transfer ownership of a repo on GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I've kept away from some projects because it's just a single dev doing 99.9% of the contributions.