Forks are almost to easy to create. Forks get created
constantly and go no where.
...
I would love if GitHub supported a model where if I
forked a repo at a version and made no changes, it
treated it like a private repo. It shouldn’t be visible
to anyone except me (unless someone hits the url
directly) until I push my first commit that is different
than the upstream. At that point it should flip to
public. This would clean up some of the fork soup we see
on pages.
My misgivings with the "root repo" aspect of this post aside, this suggestion is great; I'd really love to see this picked up by the GitHub guys.
(As mentioned in one of the post's comments, some popular projects have a lot of empty forks, which makes viewing one of their Network screens an absolute nightmare to browse when looking for active forks.)
Exactly. Branches do this already (they hide if they can be fast-forwarded). If you can fast-forward merge a fork into the local one, it should be hidden when I viewing the network page, just like local branches.
The network graph they render already does this to some extent.
(As mentioned in one of the post's comments, some popular projects have a lot of empty forks, which makes viewing one of their Network screens an absolute nightmare to browse when looking for active forks.)