Feature: Add fork analysis for "Maintained" check or a new check #2352
Comments
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This is a great suggestion! Yes, there are definitely more things that we could and should add to determine the 'liveness' of a repository (combining signals like release recency, CI test runs, dependency updates (#2458), number of graph dependents, stars/watchers). All of these signals would help end-users find the authoritative fork of a library. How many additional API calls would this require? API-heaviness is a major constraint for the scorecard cron infrastructure as well as overall performance. We should try to measure this. Another pitfall is that such changes would put some amount of pressure on maintainers to game the liveness metric, which is tricky for projects that are stable, or that don't have many dependencies, or simply don't require frequent updates. This characteristic makes it hard to score such a check. But I do agree that we should try to surface this in Raw Results. A separate idea entirely from determining whether a repository is the 'authoritative' fork is to determine whether it is a fork at all. On GitHub, it's possible to create and view forks through the Dependency Graph, or by searching commit SHAs shared between repos across GitHub. Other methods could analyze the content of a repo. But the same Qs are still open: how is this scored? And how many API calls does it cost scorecard? |
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I propose to consider metrics defined in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260552929_May_the_Fork_Be_with_You_Novel_Metrics_to_Analyze_Collaboration_on_GitHub |
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Stale issue message - this issue will be closed in 7 days |
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This issue is stale because it has been open for 60 days with no activity. |
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When checking how maintained a project is, usually if it's abandoned one tends to look if a fork has continued the abandoned project but it's cumbersome to check forks one by one
Describe the solution you'd like
if the "Maintained" check gives a low score, make scorecard check the forks and see if there are forks that have activity. At least more commits ahead of the default branch, or ,more thoroughly, run a "Maintained" check over the fork
Describe alternatives you've considered
Another alternative would be to add a new check specifically for fork analysis, would be useful also to check if there are forks that are diverging from the repo whether if it's maintained or not
Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.
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