Two repositories that are public on purpose

Update, 17 October 2026: after a spell with every repository public (2 October), only status and .github are public; see All of PaceStreak is open source. The reasoning below still explains why these two have to be.

Almost every PaceStreak repository is private. Two are public, and both look like mistakes to anyone tidying up. They are not.

The status page

status.pacestreak.com is built from the status repository by Upptime, served by GitHub Pages. A status page exists for the moment when everything else is down, and it has to be readable by anyone, without logging in, from anywhere.

A private repository cannot serve a public GitHub Pages site on the free plan, and a status page behind a login would be useless in exactly the situation it exists for. So status is public, and so is its history of checks. There is nothing secret in it: response times and up/down states for public URLs.

The .github repository

A GitHub organisation’s .github repository does two jobs:

1. Its profile/README.md becomes the organisation’s public profile page.
2. Its health files (security policy, contributing guide and so on) apply by default to the org’s public repositories.

Make it private and the profile page stops rendering, and the shared health files stop applying. So .github is public.

The consequence for private repositories

Shared health files never apply to private repositories, whatever the visibility of .github. That is why every private PaceStreak repository carries its own copy of SECURITY.md. It looks like duplication. It is the only way the file shows up.

Both facts are now written into the project notes with the reason, because “this repo shouldn’t be public” is the sort of tidy-up that feels obviously right until it breaks something.