Repository name "content" is too generic when forked

[SamB]

When I forked it, my fork was at https://github.com/SamB/content, so as soon as I pasted the clone URL after "git clone", I realized that that name was gonna confuse the heck out of me later and figured out how to rename it to https://github.com/SamB/mdn-content.

Now I notice that the instructions literally spell this out for user octocat. Poor octocat is gonna be so confused later...

Anyway, you might want to rethink this naming; while https://github.com/mdn/mdn-content would look somewhat silly, at least it would lead to clearer fork names.

[teoli2003]

Fundamentally, I agree that this would be nice. But:

• Is this easy to do in github?
• What will be the impact? Will mdn/content#xxyz links in other repo become broken? Will external links to the repo or deeplinks become broken?
• What will happen with repository links locally? Stop working? Being redirected?

I'm afraid that the negative consequences may outnumber the positive ones. But I would like to be proven wrong.

[Rumyra]

I agree with you @teoli2003 I think the consequences of re-naming could be unmanageable.

I understand it could be too generic for some - and my apologies for that @SamB - however at the moment we have no plans to update it. If we get more requests like this I will re-assess then 👍

[peterbe]

The cloning instructions are to use:

git clone [email protected]:octocat/content.git mdn/content

that makes it so that you have an automatic prefix/namespace.
E.g.

cd my-code-projects
git clone [email protected]:octocat/content.git mdn/content
cd mdn/content

Perhaps I think it's a bad idea to make your personal fork the "primary". I always let origin mean the original repo and peterbe is what I name my fork. I.e. I do:

cd my-code-projects
git clone https://github.com/chalk/supports-color.git
# Now I got to https://github.com/chalk/supports-color and press the "Fork" button,
# then I go back to the command line and type:
git remote add peterbe https://github.com/peterbe/supports-color

the advantage of this approach is that the initial git clone ... instruction is ready to be copy-n-pasted and you don't need to manually replace "octocat" with "myusername".

[Rumyra]

I understand it could be too generic for some - and my apologies for that @SamB - however at the moment we have no plans to update it. If we get more requests like this I will re-assess then 👍