Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. And because your fork, by definition, has diverged from "the mainline" because there really isn't any "mainline" anymore. You might have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100 other people who also forked just to fix one random bug or whatever, but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks.
Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further.
Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.
> but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks.
Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
IMO, yes. Providing some kind of mechanism to make it easier to gain cohesion between all the disparate forks is definitely at least part of the answer. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, though, and I don't pretend to have any real concrete suggestion in mind.
>>> Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever.
Yes, with power comes responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, don't ask for the power.
>>> but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks.
If there is enough people interested in the project, that can find one who wants to take maintainership. If they can't, the project doesn't have that much value for them.
>>>> It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes.
I don't see a problem here. If there's a strong community, fork changes naturally gravitate back there due to the advantages of community size. If there isn't, making random people be able to mess with the code base is not going to fix it.
Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further.
Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.