An open source project is a human thing. Github forks and stuff are neat, but to have a real project, some coordination is necessary, and I really wish that Github would provide more tools to encourage this. It's really dismaying to see some project with 2343232 forks, many of which are newer than the 'main' one, and see little to no coordination between them.
The solution would involve some kind of communication and perhaps a way of electing a 'leader'. I don't claim that it's a particularly easy problem to solve, but it seems to have been done when people just used a mailing list and cvs, so it is possible...
> I don't claim that it's a particularly easy problem to solve, but it seems to have been done when people just used a mailing list and cvs, so it is possible...
It worked back when we had a mailing list, CVS, and a web page because a single individual or set of individuals owned the top-level project infrastructure associated with the name in question.
Github broke that model by making forks largely non-subsidiary to the projects they fork. They exist at the same namespace, they have independent bug tracking, wikis, and author information.
This breaks the social economy of contribution that previously existed; even if you choose to not participate in Github, your project will be forked hundreds of times via published Github-based mirrors that look like every other top-level copy of the project.
Thanks for following up; I'm not the perfect person to ask but it would make sense to allow all the metrics to be specified as sort criteria. Here are a few ideas:
* number of forks
* days since last commit
* ratio of open to closed issues
* days since commiter response to issue
Definitely copy the default / demo repo implemented by the OP too.
Commits-since-fork might be a better measure than stars, e.g. most of the starred forks of brianfrankcooper/YCSB have no commits more recent than the mainline.
Nice site - it has the potential to be easier to use than the github graph. It would be nice to see how many commits the forks have ahead of their parent, or something like that.
For the moment it is as simple as using the stars from GitHub. I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if people want more or not. And now, I'll try to enhance the rate algorithm.