How to find the best changes from downstream Github forks?

Question

I am working on a new version of a Github project that was abandoned by the organization that produced it. In the years since it's been abandoned there have been about 200 different forks.

I'd like this new version to answer the needs of the community. I assume that there's some data I can extract from the forks about what people want. Are there techniques or tools to analyze the tree of forks?

Github's network diagram exists, but what about...

• Which files are modified the most? Which sections of files?
• Which issues in the original repo get the most attention in forked repos?
• Are there obvious quality metrics, other than Github stars and so on? Unfortunately running the test suite isn't mandatory so a lot of the changes fixed issues while also breaking tests.

Answer 1

No idea why github hasn't implemented the ability to list forks by popularity and activity. Here is a great script

"Lists forks of a repository containing changes not present in the parent repo. Sorts the results according to the amount of stars earned. Can be used to locate prospective forks for dying projects."

https://github.com/elimohl/find_forks

Its 3 years old, I can't seem to get it working, but someone could fork it.