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GrimoireLab Guide

Technical Forks

Question: What are the number of technical forks of an open source project on code development platforms?

A technical fork is a distributed version control copy of a project. The number of technical forks indicates the number of copies of a project on the same code development platform.

Note: Many times technical fork and clones are used interchangeably, but there is a difference between the two. A technical fork is a copy of a repository on the same platform, whereas a clone is a copy on a local machine.

Objectives

The objective of the Technical Fork metric is to ascertain how many copies of a project exist on a code development platform. Analysis of technical forks may provide insight into forking intentions (different types of forks such as contributing, and non-contributing forks).

Visualization

Steps

  1. Click on the Visualize option in the sidebar and click on + to pick your visualization type. Choose Timelion as visualization type.

  2. Set the Interval to 1M which means 1 month.

  3. Set the following Timelion Expression

.es(index=github_repositories, 
    timefield=grimoire_creation_date,  
    split=origin:10, 
    metric=max:forks_count)
.label("$1", "^.* > origin:(\S+) > .*")

  1. In the end, you should see the something similar to the following visualization depending on the repositories you have.

    forks