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.
I definitely do this. If I'm actually "watching" a repo, such as tenderlove's ARel repo, I'll put the RSS feed into my reader. Might be a little clunky to do it that way, but that's basically how I get all my other news.
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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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 32.5 ms ] threadWhat 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.
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.