Forking Alt-coins

[torbank]

I'm noticing that a number of alts are not forked from the github projects but rather uploaded, creating an entirely separate project.

Litecoin for example, is forked off of the bitcoin project, and doing diffs is sublimely trivial.

In contrast, I can't just do that with some of these other coins, it has to happen outside of the browser.

Any good reasons for creating an entirely separate project?

Edit: After the responses and some more thinking I realized it's actually a turn off when I see a coin that follows this pattern. There's at least one that calls itself a fork but isn't forked in the most fundamental of ways. And it resides on github. I'm kind of baffled.

[muddafudda]

Yep, they cant use github.

[torbank]

Yep, they cant use github.

That is too bad.

IMO, this decision will make fixing bugs that are discovered in bitcoin/litecoin far slower and more error prone.

[jackjack]

Yep, they cant use github.

Too bad.

This decision will make fixing bugs that are discovered in bitcoin/litecoin far slower and more error prone.

Don't worry, no copycoin 'dev' ever planned to fix bugs anyway

[torbank]

Yep, they cant use github.

Too bad.

This decision will make fixing bugs that are discovered in bitcoin/litecoin far slower and more error prone.

Don't worry, no copycoin 'dev' ever planned to fix bugs anyway

Good point.

[The_Catman]

It can make development a pain in the ass if you're working on multiple coins at the same time.

If there's a bunch of repos forked from each other, github will only allow you to have one of them hosted on your account at a time. If I wanted to work on Florincoin and Bitcoin (Florincoin forks back to Bitcoin through Litecoin) at the same time, I would have to setup a new account (or an organization) to host one of them (or you could fork one of them into a branch of the other, but that's just a mess).

Really, if you're changing a project in a way you know won't ever get pushed back to the original, you shouldn't be using forks.

If you want to add bug fixes from the coin you based yours off of, you can do a pull from that repo into your local repo and push back to github. That's the best way to do it regardless.