I’ve seen some projects on GitHub (howdy being one of them that came to mind) where there are forks, but when I check the forks out they are either unchanged, or are behind by a few commits. I was wondering why this would happen. It couldn’t be for archival purposes, could it?
Fork it so i have my version, regardless if the original goes away. (Assuming Github doesn’t nuke all repos of course like they did with youtube-dl for a while)
GitHub nukes forks when the original repository is deleted. The correct way to handle your use case is by creating pull mirrors, ideally on a different host.
I didn’t know this, and I’m sure a lot other people don’t know this and that’s why they fork - to have their own copy of the repo, thinking they have full control over it.
I have forked projects in the past and IIRC i had to send a request to be disassociated from the original repo, otherwise all pull requests default to the original repo which is annoying.
You can simply
git cloneon your system andpushit to whatever other remote you want. It should not be associated to the origin in that way.