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(Genuine question) what is a use case where an employee needs to fork your company’s repo rather than open a PR? The only one I can think of is what you mentio

by cj 3y ago

(Genuine question) what is a use case where an employee needs to fork your company’s repo rather than open a PR? The only one I can think of is what you mentioned (testing CI workflows that match a branch name) but at least at our company that can usually be done in a PR. I don’t see any obvious reason why an employee would ever need to fork a company’s private repo to their personal GitHub account.

owl57 3y ago
> I don’t see any obvious reason why an employee would ever need to fork a company’s private repo to their personal GitHub account. I don't see it as well, but Github docs seem to suggest that forking a private repo inside the same org is allowed/forbidden by the same setting?
edgyquant 3y ago
For large projects this can happen. Think the Linux forks that AMD etc maintain and then regularly do a series of PRs to integrate them into some staging branch which then makes its way to the kernel if approved. It’s a typical workflow for inter-org codebase.
- halostatue 3y ago
  Those are public repositories. I do not see the benefit of forking private repositories and have disabled it in the company org that I manage.
flerchin 3y ago
Every single clone is a fork. I feel like you're missing the fundamental concept of git as a DVCS.
- howinteresting 3y ago
  They clearly mean fork in the GitHub UI, not fork as in running git clone locally.
- cj 3y ago
  GitHub support disagrees: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/35849 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/35849 Clone = copy of code that you can sync with the remote on GitHub Fork = copy of code that isn’t connected to the original remote. Of course, every fork involves a clone. But not every clone is a fork. I could be wrong, but “fork” isn’t really a concept native to Git. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
  - hedora 3y ago
    Forks in git are connected by the fact that they contain identical sha’s.

by cj 3y ago

owl57 3y ago

> I don’t see any obvious reason why an employee would ever need to fork a company’s private repo to their personal GitHub account. I don't see it as well, but Github docs seem to suggest that forking a private repo inside the same org is allowed/forbidden by the same setting?

edgyquant 3y ago

For large projects this can happen. Think the Linux forks that AMD etc maintain and then regularly do a series of PRs to integrate them into some staging branch which then makes its way to the kernel if approved. It’s a typical workflow for inter-org codebase.

halostatue 3y ago
Those are public repositories. I do not see the benefit of forking private repositories and have disabled it in the company org that I manage.

flerchin 3y ago

Every single clone is a fork. I feel like you're missing the fundamental concept of git as a DVCS.

howinteresting 3y ago
They clearly mean fork in the GitHub UI, not fork as in running git clone locally.
cj 3y ago
GitHub support disagrees: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/35849 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/35849 Clone = copy of code that you can sync with the remote on GitHub Fork = copy of code that isn’t connected to the original remote. Of course, every fork involves a clone. But not every clone is a fork. I could be wrong, but “fork” isn’t really a concept native to Git. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
- hedora 3y ago
  Forks in git are connected by the fact that they contain identical sha’s.