Comment by sbarre
1 day ago
I could see them expiring/archiving/deleting inactive projects after some time.
I feel like this would have negative impacts (lots of interesting historical archives on Github) but maybe if a project hasn't been touched, or cloned, in some time, it just gets deleted with some notice.
I hope not but it will probably happen.
Just last week I found an interesting repo that hadn't been touched in 9 years. I immediately cloned it as it was something reverse engineered so DMCA isn't out of the question, but now I have two reasons to clone.
Thing is, projects that don't get touched for months and months are the least costly. Disk space is cheap; what's costly is compute time to process new commits, new/updated/closed issues, new/reviewed/merged PRs, and so on. Inactive projects just sit there taking up disk space but basically zero compute time. So it would make no sense at all for them to delete old, inactive projects. (Which doesn't mean they won't do it: they might have hidden costs I'm unaware of, or they might make stupid decisions. People do make stupid decisions sometimes).
Also creates a perverse incentive to automatically push random commits to make sure your repos stay “active” and don’t get deleted, creating more load