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I like projects like this; totally unnecessary, but fun in a kind of absurd way. I tried to post a comment but I didn’t really want to fork your repo, is there

I like projects like this; totally unnecessary, but fun in a kind of absurd way. I tried to post a comment but I didn’t really want to fork your repo, is there no other way of doing it thru github’s api?

NoahKAndrews 5y ago
The commit has to be in someone's repo, and GitHub can't reasonably allow you to push to a branch on the original repo, so you have to make a fork.
ja3k 5y ago
Thanks! Yeah it was fun to do. Once I had the idea I felt compelled to implement it. It is a little wasteful to fork the whole repo to make a comment. But it seems unavoidable with this design.
- Operyl 5y ago
  Forks don’t actually create a copy of the git objects, so effectively it’s just a row in the database.
  - brnt 5y ago
    Then how come Github shows you the photocopying page, sometimes for quite a while? It takes long enough to convince me it does more than set a pointer.
    - zauguin 5y ago
      I don't know, but since GitHub allows you to show commits from any fork with a URL referencing another fork, GitHub seems to use a common object store for all forks. Maybe setting up the separate issue tracker and Pull Requests takes some time?
    - Operyl 5y ago
      It's not "just a database row," I oversimplified a bit too much perhaps, but it pretty much is very very little in the way of data. Since the following blog post, more stuff has been added to Git (2018, iirc): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_islands.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_i... https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519 https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/ https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/ > Very early on we figured out that actually forking people’s repositories was not sustainable. For instance, there are almost 11,000 forks of Rails hosted on GitHub: if each one of them were its own copy of the repository, that would imply an incredible amount of redundant disk space, requiring several times more fileservers than the ones we have in our infrastructure.
john-doe 5y ago
I wouldn’t say unnecessary; most available comment systems are either a Discuss-style firehose of tracking scripts, or a pain to maintain when self-hosted.

NoahKAndrews 5y ago

The commit has to be in someone's repo, and GitHub can't reasonably allow you to push to a branch on the original repo, so you have to make a fork.

ja3k 5y ago

Thanks! Yeah it was fun to do. Once I had the idea I felt compelled to implement it. It is a little wasteful to fork the whole repo to make a comment. But it seems unavoidable with this design.

Operyl 5y ago
Forks don’t actually create a copy of the git objects, so effectively it’s just a row in the database.
- brnt 5y ago
  Then how come Github shows you the photocopying page, sometimes for quite a while? It takes long enough to convince me it does more than set a pointer.
  - zauguin 5y ago
    I don't know, but since GitHub allows you to show commits from any fork with a URL referencing another fork, GitHub seems to use a common object store for all forks. Maybe setting up the separate issue tracker and Pull Requests takes some time?
  - Operyl 5y ago
    It's not "just a database row," I oversimplified a bit too much perhaps, but it pretty much is very very little in the way of data. Since the following blog post, more stuff has been added to Git (2018, iirc): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_islands.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_i... https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519 https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/ https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/ > Very early on we figured out that actually forking people’s repositories was not sustainable. For instance, there are almost 11,000 forks of Rails hosted on GitHub: if each one of them were its own copy of the repository, that would imply an incredible amount of redundant disk space, requiring several times more fileservers than the ones we have in our infrastructure.

john-doe 5y ago

I wouldn’t say unnecessary; most available comment systems are either a Discuss-style firehose of tracking scripts, or a pain to maintain when self-hosted.