[DannoHung]

Why don't they just let project maintainers say, "This project contains x, y, and z" or something? That'd at least let them get a leg up on doing the categorization right and I don't think many people would mind having that capability.

[mindcrime]

+1000. Github routinely detects the wrong language for my projects, and there is no way to manually override it. My take is this: If you want to auto-detect the language, fine... but let the owner of the repo override your detection when it's wrong.

It's probably also a bug to even have the notion of "a language" for a repo given the burgeoning polyglot programming trend. So many repos these days contain multiple languages, especially when you consider javascript, that I question if it even makes sense to say 'This project is in language X' at all.

Like you say, the best option really would be to let the repo owners / maintainers just specify this stuff. They are, after all, the ones who know.

[itcmcgrath]

I wish I had more up buttons. Sometimes you can be too smart of your own good, and the good old fashioned way is superior...

Note: I'm not saying they shouldn't have the auto-detection, because it definitely helps if the maintainer doesn't do it, but for those that want to help classify things - let them!

[ancarda]

Actually, a way to turn off that feature would be nice. It adds very little value at the cost of it taking days to update. It also marks my dotfiles repo as "VimL" which means any auto-resume tool will assume I know VimL, when I don't. Funny thing is it marks my .vimrc as Perl, not VimL.

[elwell]

I disagree; I think the process should be as streamlined as possible. However, I could see auto-detection balanced with a confidence threshold; which, when not met, would ask user:

"Sorry, I couldn't determine if you had C code in your repo or is that Limbo code?"

[Allan_Smithee]

You mean like the other source code repository hosts do?