What if the owner of some repository on github has stopped working on some project but I want to contribute to it?

Question

I recently liked a repository on Github. I raised some pull requests but the owner of the repository has stopped working on that repository. My pull requests remain open. The last commit by him was over two years ago. What should I do in this situation? I don't want that I do a lot of changes and new additions and still it shows in my repo only. Should I create a new repository of mine?

Answer 1

This is my workflow:

• Keep maintaining your fork.
• Ping the owner a few times (using @owner-username ). Maybe (s)he just missed your pull request, for some reason.

• If after some time you don't get any feedback, I would recommend converting your fork into a source repository by deleting your fork repository (this will not close/delete the pull request) and pushing your fork repository there:

   cd your-fork git remote set-url origin http://github.com/your-username/repo git push --all 

  I prefer sources over forks because forks have some limitations (eg you cannot search code in forks).

• Finally, it's good to add a note that your repository is a continuation of the unmaintained repository.

Answer 2

As one of the comments suggests continue to work on your fork and it may become the de facto version of the particular thing.

I thought I would add an additional answer for people searching that land here as Github recently added a new feature that maintainers who may not have time to actively develop something they started can make use of: archiving .

From the blog post:

Archiving a repository makes it read-only to everyone (including repository owners). This includes editing the repository, issues, pull requests, labels, milestones, projects, wiki, releases, commits, tags, branches, reactions and comments. No one can create new issues, pull requests, or comments on an archived repository, but you can still fork archived repositories—allowing development to continue elsewhere for archived open source projects.

To archive a repository, go to your Repository Settings Page and click Archive this repository.