[fragmede]

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[agolio]

To clarify the appropriateness of this analogy:

This is unexpected behaviour from Github here which may (and has, by the anecdote of OP) cause permanent data loss. Documentation is not good enough, as users should not have been expected to have read the entire documentation.

[chrisfosterelli]

I guess this is a question of who should have been given further information. For example, whoever at the organization deleted the repo would have been given a very clear warning screen including the number of forks that would be deleted by their action prior to them doing it.

On that note, an organization admin can _directly_ delete your private fork without even deleting the source repository if they want. GitHub's permission model is fairly direct that private forks you make through your membership in an organization are more the organization's property than the forker's.

[capableweb]

> I guess this is a question of who should have been given further information. For example, whoever at the organization deleted the repo would have been given a very clear warning screen including the number of forks that would be deleted by their action prior to them doing it.

This is exactly how it works today already. If I try to delete a private repository people have forked, I see the following:

> We will also delete all 4 forks since this is a private repository.

Clicking on the delete button, again:

> Unexpected bad things will happen if you don’t read this!

> This will also delete all 4 forks since this is a private repository.

> [type name of repository]

[chrisfosterelli]

Yes, that's what I said. It sounds like the parent poster is suggesting that the fork account should instead have that notice.

[donmcronald]

IMO it would be useful if non-obvious behavior like that were warned about when you fork the repo. I know I'd get burned by that. I keep a local mirror of everything though.

[chrisfosterelli]

That's a fair point.

[alerighi]

In my opinion in this case the fork shouldn't be allowed to be created at all. If this is the final effect it's better to inform the user that "no, we don't let you fork the repo". So he could have done it the normal way, clone the repo and push it with another remote, that would have not had this issue.

To this day I thought that the "fork" concept was only a relationship at the level of UI, but as I see it has a logic in it, that is the fork depends on the original repository even for permissions, and that to me is surprising!

[chrisfosterelli]

I think you're misunderstanding the way that a lot of orgs use forks. Many orgs will have the team fork the repo under their own account so they get their own working space, and then they make PRs from their forks back to the origin. Before branch protections it was also the best way to manage write permission. This is a really common pattern and not allowing it would break how a lot of people use github.

If the org doesn't work this way, it can disable forking so that it's not allowed at all on the repo (or org-wide), like you said.

[Barrin92]

I don't think it's an unexpected at all given that the original repo was private, not just the fork. Secondly a GitHub "user" isn't really a user in the consumer sense. They're a developer, as a developer/professional you can be expected to consult the documentation of a tool you use so you understand default behavior.

[themitigating]

Is it unexpected though? The repo was forked from an org by the person who was a member of that org.

I know this isn't common but I actually use a unique user for my company "myname-company"