Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Ambiguous docs around fork deletion can lead to confusion #34383

Closed
1 task done
ahpook opened this issue Aug 22, 2024 · 3 comments · Fixed by #34384
Closed
1 task done

Ambiguous docs around fork deletion can lead to confusion #34383

ahpook opened this issue Aug 22, 2024 · 3 comments · Fixed by #34384
Labels
content This issue or pull request belongs to the Docs Content team pull requests Content related to pull requests

Comments

@ahpook
Copy link
Contributor

ahpook commented Aug 22, 2024

Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/working-with-forks/what-happens-to-forks-when-a-repository-is-deleted-or-changes-visibility#deleting-a-public-repository

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

The text of the linked section on deleting a fork says only that "a fork" will be promoted to be the head of a fork network when the current upstream is deleted. This can lead to confusion about the expected behavior in this scenario. In fact, the current oldest fork will be promoted to the new upstream, and a simple change to the docs could eliminate that ambiguity and subsequent confusion.

Additional information

A security researcher was confused about this behavior and posted that when the head of a fork network is deleted, and arbitrary fork is promoted to be the head of the network, which could introduce a takeover attack if the fork thus promoted was owned by a bad actor. Clearly documenting that it's the oldest active fork rather than an arbitrary one would reduce the frightening possibility of a takeover.

https://x.com/trufflesec/status/1823069323348611345

@ahpook ahpook added the content This issue or pull request belongs to the Docs Content team label Aug 22, 2024
Copy link

welcome bot commented Aug 22, 2024

Thanks for opening this issue. A GitHub docs team member should be by to give feedback soon. In the meantime, please check out the contributing guidelines.

@github-actions github-actions bot added the triage Do not begin working on this issue until triaged by the team label Aug 22, 2024
@nguyenalex836
Copy link
Contributor

@ahpook Thank you for opening an issue and linking it to your PR! ✨

@nguyenalex836 nguyenalex836 added pull requests Content related to pull requests and removed triage Do not begin working on this issue until triaged by the team labels Aug 22, 2024
@2002lDfe

This comment was marked as spam.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
content This issue or pull request belongs to the Docs Content team pull requests Content related to pull requests
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging a pull request may close this issue.

3 participants