Context

I often found valuable projects with many forks. Sometimes I would like to add something to the original functionality, so I go for forking. However to prevent reinventing the wheel, I would like to ensure no one done such kind of work before. So I review the existing forks, but usually those just a stalling copies. In case of 100 forks this is a tedious work.

Question

Given a github repo, how to see if one or more of its fork has measurable activity? I would like to do this to filter out the "just another copy" like forks.

CodePudding user response：

I don't think Github itself provides an easy way to do this, but some third-party tools have been written to help with that.

gitpop3 for example supports sorting the forks of a given repository by either number of stars, forks, commits or the last modified date.

CodePudding user response：

GitHub has a network graph as one of their features for Understanding connections between repositories. This provides a:

Timeline of the most recent commits to this repository and its network ordered by most recently pushed to.

This would show the most recently active forks just below the main repository. You can access it at https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/network, e.g. here's one from one of my repos.