The main thread seems better:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989684" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989684</a><p>This lacks additional content or context. It is simply the author promoting some 2016 letter/article criticising GitHub, and then very loosely tying it to recent changes. It is self-promoting blogspam.
>the world's largest open source community<p>Is github even considered an open source community? Open source projects work on github, sure, (so do closed source projects) but github is not the community. It is a tool.
One click pull/update for forked repos? Not holding my breath on it...<p>This is something that more than a few people want, and at one time, it did exist; a simple button you'd click on your fork of a repo, that would go and pull down/merge the latest from the original.<p>I'm probably not alone in this - but I have a ton of repo "forks" that I just keep around but don't make mods to, but try (and fail) to keep up to date with the original. Why?<p>Well - because some of these interest me, but aren't often changed if at all - and I worry that some day, the repo will just up and disappear (ie - be deleted), and the code will be gone. So I keep a copy.<p>This does have the assumption that if they delete their repo, that my branch won't disappear (I assume this is true - wouldn't make sense if that happened). The same kind of thing could even happen to a well used and updated codebase, just because the developer decides this is the thing to do.<p>So a hedge against this kind of thing.<p>But keeping the forks up-to-date - for the ones that are popular - is a pain. A single button should be all that is needed, but doesn't exist. So instead, you have to do this weird process (can't remember the exact steps - I recall there's a point you issue a PR and validate it yourself, as part of the process - it makes no sense). Note that this is all thru the web interface for github.<p>One could keep the repos locally, then issue fetch/pull/merges to grab the latest, but I'd like to avoid the storage req's of that.<p>In the meantime, I've tried to create a process - that mostly works - that fetches the latest version of the repo, if it exists, as the compressed archive, then stores it in a local "directory" that's a VFS to google drive (IIRC), but it's still in a beta/dev phase and on a back burner.<p>It's too bad there isn't a way you could specify a fork as a non-updated thing, that just automagically received the updates as they occurred (and then stayed around or was compressed if the op deleted their original branch).
This seems like a really interesting business model but also one that will benefit a lot of smaller developer who use github. I'm excited to see how this all pans out.
I am wondering how long this will last and at what point they will prohibit repo owners from using alternative funding methods like bounty source or bitcoin.