

Why Do People "Watch" Code? A Short Survey for Open Source Devs - pharkmillups
http://phark.posterous.com/why-do-people-watch-code-a-short-survey-for-o

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stcredzero
The presenter at the meet up last night watches projects on Github as "a poor
man's bookmark." Time for Github to implement other lists.

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grinich
That's exactly how I use it as well.

What I'd like to see is a "★/☆" for a repo, branch, or commit. Similar to the
way you can ★ a question or answer on StackOverflow.

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sophacles
I frequently watch code because it is one of a set of projects. I don't care
about that project specifically, but I like to see it is active, make sure
they aren't going in a direction that will mean trouble could be headed
downstream to what I actually care about and so on.

I also watch projects that I think could amount to a big deal, but are
currently in the concept phase. That way as they get going and start solving a
problem I know how it goes.

Finally I watch projects that are solving problems I may have insight into --
so I see places I can contribute.

In all these cases I don't fork because I am not engaged enough to maintain an
active fork, since they you must manually pull the upstream master
regularly... annoying if I'm not doing it because I'm involved. Then I can
just clone from the head easily when it is time to fork or modify the code.

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Osmose
Is there any way you can make the results public so we can see them, or are
you going to wait before sharing?

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pharkmillups
I'm planning on building the suspense until enough responses come in for a
follow up post to make sense. When that happens, I'll make sure to share
everything.

