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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Programming
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What do you think that people should be doing instead? What is your own workflow when contributing to projects on GitHub?
OP is referring specifically to those who don't contribute but fork anyway.
How could anyone possibly know that those people don't contribute? Why would anyone even try finding that information?
you compare the number of forks with the number of contributors
forks are almost always higher, not just higher, but often by a factor of 10
that is just people that got their commits in, it doesn't mean that others didn't try to contribute, but failed.
I'd do a PR. Although I would understand forking if the project maintainers wouldn't merge a PR. (or create an issue (for the fix/ addition) if the README says that it's an option)
So while you're working on your PR, where do you push your commits? If you don't fork, you can't push them to Github. You don't have access to the repo you're making a PR for. That's exactly why people fork.
Of course you could just NOT push any commits, but then your commits only exist locally on your development machine, and if you have a hardware failure you've lost them, defeating the point of a distributed version control system. Or you could push them to another computer you have access to, but Github lets you push to your own free account for free, so most people would rather just do that. Which they do. By creating a fork.
Maybe it's okay if you're only creating a small PR with a single commit or two. But for more extensive development, anyone reasonable is going to create a fork so they have somewhere to store their work until it's ready. Once/If the PR is merged, the fork is abandoned as it's no longer needed. But that's why they exist.
A PR requires push access... That's why you create a fork... So you can create a PR from your fork.
You generally have to fork to create a PR...