The post is omitting that the user must type the name of the repository in full; in this case, they typed `httpie/httpie`. If one is in such a deep autopilot state, no amount of warnings will work.
Your comment is omitting that the post covered this exact point in detail: they had just done the same operating on their personal profile where you have to type [username]/[username]. [organization]/[organization] is the obvious corrolary.
Anyways it's embarrassing that Github made this same mistake themselves, and yet couldn't spare the time for a massive content creator contributing to their platform
> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.
> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
There's a subtle naming difference between profile README repos for users and orgs that was the root cause of this. The user typed the repo name in however because it matched the same format for the previous profile README repo, it didn't register that this was not in fact the profile README repo they were looking for.
Does anybody actually type those? They were a neat solution 10 years ago but they’re so common now for even inconsequential actions that I always copy and paste, on complete autopilot.
I came across such a prompt maybe three times total in my life, all of them making GitHub repos public or private, or deleting them. Made me stop completely in my track. So it seems to be very much dependent on what you do day to day.
They address that in the post. Github treats organization accounts differently from personal accounts, and what would have worked perfectly fine and expected for a personal user account actually impacted a different and unexpected repo for an organization account. I would wager 99% of Github users would make a similar mistake in the same situation since they rarely deal with organization accounts directly.
The post did not omit that, it included the very similar thing they typed as context for how they auto-piloted it.
In that autopilot state having to type out 54000 would probably have snapped them out of it.
I get why you'd think the author is being unreasonable, they seem to imply that this should already have been done, but I think that is mostly them feeling upset about the situation. The actual observations would be thoughtful improvements to the UI.
