Misleading title.
If my thing was public in the past, and I took it private, the old public code is still public.
That’s… How the Internet works anyway.
Edit: See Eager Eagle’s better explanation below.
TL;DR - be careful who you allow to fork your private repos. And if you need to take a public repo, which has forks, private, consider archiving the repo and doing all the new work in a new repo. Which is arguably the reasonable thing to do anyway.
Still a misleading title. This isn’t a way to break into all or even most of your private repositories.
That is not exactly what they are saying. You could create a private fork of a public repo and the code in your private fork is publicly accessible.
I don’t think you can create private forks from public repos (the fork is public upon creation). This is more like the opposite:
If there’s a private repo that is forked and the fork is made public, further changes to that original private repo become public too, despite the repo remaining private and the fork not being synced.
Misleading title.
The title literally spells out the concern, which is that code that is in a private or deleted repository is, in some circumstances, visible publicly.
What title would you propose?
If my thing was public in the past, and I took it private, the old public code is still public.
The “Accessing Private Repo Data” section covers a situation where code that has always been private becomes publicly visible.
While this is still a massive problem, it does require a public fork at some point. So if you have a private repo that has never had a public fork, you should be safe.
Yes, but only in very limited circumstances. If you:
- fork a private repo with commit A into another private repo
- add commit B in your fork
- someone makes the original repo public
- You add commit C to the still private fork
then commits A and B are publicly visible, but commit C is not.
If a public repository is made private, its public forks are split off into a new network.
Modifying the above situation to start with a public repo:
- fork a public repository that has commit A
- make commit B in your fork
- You delete your fork
Commit B remains visible.
A version of this where step 3 is to take the fork private isn’t feasible because you can’t take a fork private - you have to duplicate the repo. And duplicated repos aren’t part of the same repository network in the way that forks are, so the same situation wouldn’t apply.
Im thinking of self hosting Forgejo one day.
sourcehut is much better if you can pay
Edit: Only repo hosters need to pay. Everything else is free.
Considering that git doesn’t need federation, and email is the grandfather of federation, sourcehut has a working version of it this very moment.
What makes sourcehut better?
From a self-hosting perspective, it looks like much more of a pain to get it set up and to keep it updated. There aren’t even official Docker images or builds. (There’s this and the forks of it, but it’s unofficial and explicitly says it’s not recommended for prod use.)
Sourcehut has straightforward much better UI, UX, and features (more than gitea/forgejo but less than GitLab ig). I really dig the subdomain design.
Issues and PRs are conducted through email, essentially making that part federated and signup-less.
I’ve seen many pieces of software that claim to be beta/not used for prod but are actually bedrock solid.
Damn that’s a huge problem
The takeaway is to not use forks if there are changes you want to keep private.
The takeaway is still https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
