[Crito]

Exactly.

I think that asking "what repos have you cloned just so that you could look at something, not intending on actually building or using that particular code" is probably roughly analogous to asking "what Wikipedia pages have you read recently" I frequently do both of those for the same reasons.

I might pull up the wikipedia page for the Apollo Lunar Module because I suddenly realize that I don't know how the RCS thrusters on it work, or I might clone git's repo because I suddenly realize that I don't know how git-notes is implemented.

In either case, I don't read the whole thing (and certainly not straight through in a linear manner, like I read Moby Dick), but rather I'm going to grep/ctrl-f to the part that I'm interested in, then probably jump around a dozen or more times until I am satisfied. That's still reading though.

[spinlock]

You just made me realize that github needs better search. I like the presentation on github but, without git grep, I just pull it local and read from there.

[lukeschlather]

Where I work we have a well-maintained OpenGrok instance which works great.

I still end up pulling down the repo and using grep 90% of the time. OpenGrok is what I use when I don't even know which repo I'm interested in.

[gatehouse]

It is possible to search for a string within a repo but it isn't a grep replacement.

Example: https://github.com/django/django/search?q=modelchoicefield&t...