// the find
defunkt/github-gem
`github` command line helper for simplifying your GitHub experience.
A Ruby CLI wrapper from GitHub's early days (pre-pull-request era) that scripts git remotes for fetching forks, tracking a project's "network," and browsing issues via the API. It's really only relevant if you're curious how GitHub workflows looked before pull requests existed.
Each command lives in its own file under lib/commands with a matching spec, so the command/helper split is easy to follow. The network patch-queue feature (listing commits across every fork you don't have, filtering by whether they apply cleanly) solved a real problem before PRs existed. Test coverage is broad — nearly every command has a corresponding spec file.
The binary is named `gh`, which now collisions head-on with GitHub's official CLI (cli/cli) — installing this gem will break or shadow that tool. The whole workflow (fetch/merge/cherry-pick across forks manually) is what pull requests replaced, so the core use case is gone. It depends on json_pure/json C-extension gems from the pre-Bundler Ruby era, and there's nothing in the README about Ruby version support or how it behaves on modern Ruby/git versions. This is a project kept alive by nostalgia, not by anyone actually using it for GitHub workflows today.