Pull request displays "unknown repo" after deletion of fork

[tobiasvl]

I recently had a pull request approved. I deleted the feature branch afterwards, as it was not needed anymore, and I also deleted the fork, because I didn't need it anymore either. Now the pull request came from an "unknown repository":

I understand that the reason is that the repo's name is retrieved dynamically and that it doesn't exist anymore when it's deleted, but this behavior is pretty jarring and I have to wonder if it's intended. I'd rather not keep old, out-of-date forks around just so past pull requests aren't "broken".

I guess there might be a privacy concern here, as deleted/private repos should probably not be publicized in any way, but seeing as the old fork's name is saved for posterity in the merge commit message, that shouldn't really be a problem.

[patcon]

+1

[tobiasvl]

Reply from @rsese of GitHub staff:

Thanks very much for the feedback! I believe this was a recent change so I'm not positive if this behavior is intended for merged pull requests, but I'll find out if this was the intention and I'll also mention your thoughts to the team for discussion.

[tobiasvl]

Just wanted to followup and let you know that I found that this was change was made in part to make it more clear why a pull request can't be re-opened (you can't reopen a closed pull request if the head repository is deleted). But I think you make a good point about merged pull requests so I'll mention this to the folks that implemented the change for discussion.

[patcon]

👍

[TomNaessens]

👍

[gustavotemple]

+1

[hansfn]

Just for the record: This is still an issue. I just deleted my forked repository, and the (approved) pull request is now said to come from an "unknown repository".

[DanailMinchev]

Any updates on this?

[nvasilescu]

still having this problem. Now i'm stuck if i don't choose another name for the repo. I deleted a repor trying to upload again as not all files seemed to upload. Now the desktop client sees the repo missing as it was deleted but can't unpublish.

[rwanyoike]

👍

[maximd]

+1

[DanielAsher]

👍

[dijonkitchen]

+1

[brunowego]

+1

[Schweinepriester]

+1

[OPersian]

+1

[NiklasRosenstein]

+1

[ErikSwan]

+1. This feels like something is broken even if it's intended behavior. I would rather the string be saved with the pull request instead of retrieved dynamically. Since I believe pull requests are stored with the upstream repo, I don't feel like this should be too difficult.

[szakharchenko]

+1. Not having this encourages users to keep stale forks.

[DanielAsher]

@szakharchenko +1
agreed.

[atodorov]

+1

[dr1s]

+1

[vz10]

+1

[TamoshaytisV]

+1

[dorosh]

+1

[cmltaWt0]

+1

[botatoes]

Hi All, I'm a PM at GitHub.

We pushed out a fix for the unknown repo issue this week. This fix brings back the branch information when the repository has been deleted.

Before:

After: