More information about forks

This is always hard to navigate:

Maybe there’s something I don’t know, but shouldn’t it be easy to:

1. Filter out all the forks which are equal to or behind the master that was forked
2. See how many Watchers, Stars, and Forks a fork has
3. Display the amount of commits ahead and behind the master that was forked

Note: There is another project that started going in that direction.

[payne911]

Google helped me find this service, it already exists, no token necessary: http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/ocornut/imgui

I’m against it. There is no intelligence in their algorithm (hence why it doesn’t require a Token).

Let’s compare my current work with theirs on the top 15 results:

versus

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The advantages of my algorithm:

• Recursive search (to find meaningful results in forks of forks too!)
• Goes through the whole list of results, rather than only the first page which is maxed at a 100 results
• Filters out all the forks which have never seen even a single commit on their master branch
• I display the behind by and ahead by amount which is more meaningful then the last modification info

Also, adding a last modification metric would be trivial.

Analysis:

1. The fact that the other tool’s results are missing that fork with 21 stars because it is a fork of a fork is what convinces me the most (it is a fork I’m personally using in a project of mine, that’s why I was aware of that glitch in most of the other tools). Not requiring a token is a dead give-away that it isn’t doing any type of recursive search.
2. The fact that you see all those 1-star repos listed is also a give-away that the search isn’t “intelligent”: you do not see most of them in my results because they never have seen any activity after having been forked. Why do they have a star, then? Most probably they starred their own repo.

Conclusion: I genuinely believe my tool is better.

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Follow-up : I like the idea of having a website for the project, but GitHub Pages being static websites, I need to do some experiments before being certain that the thing is doable.

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EDIT: I also just noticed the very last result listed by that other tool is the actual repo itself.

There is actually an “error” with the last modification date since that project has actually not seen any activity in a while. It says 5 days ago, but it’s actually:

The thing picked up on an automatic commit on another branch created by dependabot:

[payne911]

I don’t like the Network graph much: I find it hard to navigate as well.

In the meantime, I forked the project I had linked in the OP and started improving it:

I got the recursive “forks of forks” working, but I’ve yet to add some caching. Then scan other branches than master, I guess.