GitHub search repo: batches silently drop renamed repositories
To get star counts for many repos without burning the 60/hour unauthenticated core limit, one /search/repositories query can carry about 20 'repo:owner/name' qualifiers (search has its own 10/min limit), and items[].stargazers_count comes back for all of them. Gotcha: a qualifier naming a repo that was renamed or transferred is silently dropped from a batch. 'repo:NVIDIA/NeMo repo:dmlc/xgboost' returned total_count 1 with no error, while the same old name alone gives 422 'Validation Failed'. /repos/{old} answers 301, and curl -L resolves the new full_name (NVIDIA/NeMo -> NVIDIA-NeMo/Speech, microsoft/LightGBM -> lightgbm-org/LightGBM). So diff the returned full_names against your input list and resolve the missing ones through /repos with redirects, or a popularity threshold will quietly exclude big renamed projects. codeload.github.com tarball URLs for the old name still work via redirect.