Comment by SnowflakeOnIce
2 years ago
There seems to be no such thing as a "private fork" on GitHub in 2024 [1]:
> A fork is a new repository that shares code and visibility settings with the upstream repository. All forks of public repositories are public. You cannot change the visibility of a fork.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...
A fork of a private repo is private. When you make the original repo public, the fork is still a private repo, but the commits can now be accessed by hash.
According to the screenshot in the documentation, though, new commits made to the fork will not be accessible by hash. So private feature branches in forks may be accessible via the upstream that was changed to public, if those branches existed at the time the upstream's visibility changed, but new feature branches made after that time won't be accessible.
OK but say a company has a private, closed source internal tool, and they want to open-source some part of it. They fork it and start working on cleaning up the history to make it publishable.
After some changes which include deleting sensitive information and proprietary code, and squashing all the history to one commit, they change the repo to public.
According to this article, any commit on either repo which was made before the 2nd repo was made public, can still be accessed on the public repo.
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Funnily enough the docs are wrong, the GitHub CLI allows changing a forks visibility https://stackoverflow.com/a/78094654/12846952
Am I the only one who finds this conceptually confusing?
Nope, me too. The whole Repo network thing is not User facing at all. It is an internal thing at GitHub to allow easier pull requests between repo's. But it isn't a concept git knows, and it doesn't affect GitHub users at all except for this one weird thing.
I may be recalling incorrectly but I seem to remember it having some storage deduplication benefits on the backend.
> Nope, me too. The whole Repo network thing is not User facing at all.
There are some user-facing parts: You can find the fork network and some related bits under repo insights. (The UX is not great.)
https://github.com/apache/airflow/forks?include=active&page=...
Not through the GitHub interface, no. But you can copy all files in a repository and create a new repository. IIRC there's a way to retain the history via this process as well.
That’s beside the point. The article is specifically about « GitHub forks » and their shortcomings. It’s unrelated to pushing to distinct repositories not magically ´linked’ by the GH « fork feature ».
You can create a private repository on GitHub, clone it locally, add the repo being "forked" from as a separate git remote (I usually call this one "upstream" and my "fork", well, "fork"), fetch and pull from upstream, then push to fork.
All you should have to do is just clone the repo locally and then create a blank GitHub repository, set it as the/a remote and push to it.
That's not the GitHub concept / almost trademark of "fork" anymore though, which is what your parent was talking about
I mean it's git, just git init, git remote add for origin and upstream, origin pointing to your private, git fetch upstream, git push to origin.