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Is fork part of git? I don't see it mentioned in the official documentation: git-scm.com Fork seems like some feature cloud storage services invented.
by peteey 9y ago
Is fork part of git? I don't see it mentioned in the official documentation: git-scm.com
Fork seems like some feature cloud storage services invented.
- Gaelan 9y agoThe terminology is a GitHub-and-friends thing, but the idea is at the core of git. When you clone a repository, you're creating a "fork" of the repo on your own computer. Git is a DVCS (distributed VCS), where you can make many copies/forks of a repository and freely push/pull commits between them. (As opposed to something like SVN, where the repository lives on a single server, and all commits go directly to that server without a separate "push" step.)
- chungy 9y agoThe terminology is at least a couple decades older than GitHub has even existed, and was even mentioned somewhere by Linus in the creation of Git. Fork used to have a very negative connotation, and that was related to the difficulty required to pull one off. When you forked a project, you had to set up your own hosting, web space, issue tracker, version control system (and you probably couldn't clone and start off the upstream's VCS), and so forth. The technical barrier made it so that you only forked a project when you have severe disagreements with upstream; some of the most famous in history include EGCS from GCC, and XEmacs from Emacs. With DVCSes, including Git, much of that technical difficulty is automatically removed. Every clone can potentially be a fork (as in, a new independent project), and this was one of Linus's intentions. If forking is easy, it keeps upstream on their toes. After being adopted by DVCS hosting sites like GitHub, it turned around to being a positive term even.