Ok, Cassian says forking does not sound completely healthy thing to do. Well, for those none geeks out there, what it means is that if there is that in github, a bunch of code is collected together in a repository.
If you want to work on someone’s software, then there is the concept of a fork. That is make an exact copy of the entire history and then you have your own copy.
The language of revision control is all about trees, so when you want to do some of your own editing, you create the branch (of a tree).
When you make a complete copy, it’s like a fork in the road, so you go on your path and I go on mine.
This works really well except for Github issues. That is the problems that you have. YOu don’t get a copy of these. So you decide if you are really transferring a repo or forking.
Transfer a repo including issues
Transferring makes sense when you are working and want to move the work from same your private world to a new startup organization (hooray). This way all your issues and things get moved and tracked.
The way to do this is to:
- Delete all invitations and make sure that all the collaborators in the destination organization exist. For instance, if you have a invitation outstanding, you need to delete that. This makes sense because issues and everything move over. Otherwise, you will get obscure error about insufficient collaborator seats.
- Go to the repo in questions and choose settings > options. Scroll down all the way to the very, very, very bottom and click on
Transferand then you can put it any place including any organization for which you have access rights. Pretty cool.
This is really nice as all issues are right there.
Moving issues
If you didn’t do this and just recreate the repo, then all your issues will be lost. However, if it is still in the same organization. All is not lost, because git now lets you move issues from one repo to another. Hooray, that is super great.
So now an issue can move if you discover it is really for a different project. In the old days, you had to recreate it.
Zenhub instead of Jira
And finally for those of us who think Kanban style, there is finally a way to manage issues this way. it does cost money, but Zenhub lives on top of Github issues, so you can drag and drop and see what is going on in a graphical way. Nice!
