Are Git forks actually Git clones

Question

I keep hearing people say they re forking code in Git  Git  fork  sounds suspiciously like Git  clone  plus some  meaningless  psychological willingness to forgo future merges   There is no fork command in Git  right   GitHub makes forks a little more real by stapling correspondence onto it  That is  you press the fork button and later  when you press the pull request button  the system is smart enough to email the owner  Hence  it s a little bit of a dance around repository ownership and permissions   Yes No  Any angst over GitHub extending Git in this direction  Or any rumors of Git absorbing the functionality

User · Accepted Answer

Fork  in the GitHub context  doesn t extend Git   It only allows clone on the server side   When you clone a GitHub repository on your local workstation  you cannot contribute back to the upstream repository unless you are explicitly declared as  contributor   That s because your clone is a separate instance of that project  If you want to contribute to the project  you can use forking to do it  in the following way    clone that GitHub repository on your GitHub account  that is the  fork  part  a clone on the server side  contribute commits to that GitHub repository  it is in your own GitHub account  so you have every right to push to it  signal any interesting contribution back to the original GitHub repository  that is the  pull request  part by way of the changes you made on your own GitHub repository    Check also  Collaborative GitHub Workflow    If you want to keep a link with the original repository  also called upstream   you need to add a remote referring that original repository   See  What is the difference between origin and upstream on GitHub      And with Git 2 20  Q4 2018  and more  fetching from fork is more efficient  with delta islands

User · Answer

In simplest terms   When you say you are forking a repository  you are basically creating a copy of the original repository under your GitHub ID in your GitHub account   and  When you say you are cloning a repository  you are creating a local copy of the original repository in your system  PC laptop  directly without having a copy in your GitHub account

User · Answer

There is a misunderstanding here with respect to what a  fork  is  A fork is in fact nothing more than a set of per-user branches  When you push to a fork you actually do push to the original repository  because that is the ONLY repository   You can try this out by pushing to a fork  noting the commit and then going to the original repository and using the commit ID  you ll see that the commit is  in  the original repository   This makes a lot of sense  but it is far from obvious  I only discovered this accidentally recently    When John forks repository SuperProject what seems to actually happen is that all branches in the source repository are replicated with a name like  John master    John new gui project   etc   GitHub  hides  the  John   from us and gives us the illusion we have our own  copy  of the repository on GitHub  but we don t and nor is one even needed   So my fork s branch  master  is actually named  Korporal master   but the GitHub UI never reveals this  showing me only  master    This is pretty much what I think goes on under the hood anyway based on stuff I ve been doing recently and when you ponder it  is very good design   For this reason I think it would be very easy for Microsoft to implement Git forks in their Visual Studio Team Services offering

User · Answer

Forking is done when you decide to contribute to some project  You would make a copy of the entire project along with its history logs  This copy is made entirely in your repository and once you make these changes  you issue a pull request  Now its up-to the owner of the source to accept your pull request and incorporate the changes into the original code   Git clone is an actual command that allows users to get a copy of the source  git clone  URL  This should create a copy of  URL  in your own local repository

User · Answer

Cloning involves making a copy of the git repository to a local machine  while forking is cloning the repository into another repository  Cloning is for personal use only  although future merges may occur   but with forking you are copying and opening a new possible project path

User · Answer

Yes  fork is a clone  It emerged because  you cannot push to others  copies without their permission  They make a copy of it for you  fork   where you will have write permission as well   In the future if the actual owner or others users with a fork like your changes they can pull it back to their own repository  Alternatively you can send them a  pull-request

User · Answer

Fork  in this context means  Make a copy of their code so that I can add my own modifications   There s not much else to say  Every clone is essentially a fork  and it s up to the original to decide whether to pull the changes from the fork

User · Answer

I keep hearing people say they re forking code in git  Git  fork  sounds suspiciously like git  clone  plus some  meaningless  psychological willingness to forgo future merges  There is no fork command in git  right     Forking  is a concept  not a command specifically supported by any version control system   The simplest kind of forking is synonymous with branching  Every time you create a branch  regardless of your VCS  you ve  forked   These forks are usually pretty easy to merge back together   The kind of fork you re talking about  where a separate party takes a complete copy of the code and walks away  necessarily happens outside the VCS in a centralized system like Subversion  A distributed VCS like Git has much better support for forking the entire codebase and effectively starting a new project   Git  not GitHub  natively supports  forking  an entire repo  ie  cloning it  in a couple of ways    when you clone  a remote called origin is created for you by default all the branches in the clone will track their origin equivalents fetching and merging changes from the original project you forked from is trivially easy   Git makes contributing changes back to the source of the fork as simple as asking someone from the original project to pull from you  or requesting write access to push changes back yourself  This is the part that GitHub makes easier  and standardizes      Any angst over Github extending git in this direction  Or any rumors of git absorbing the functionality    There is no angst because your assumption is wrong  GitHub  extends  the forking functionality of Git with a nice GUI and a standardized way of issuing pull requests  but it doesn t add the functionality to Git  The concept of full-repo-forking is baked right into distributed version control at a fundamental level  You could abandon GitHub at any point and still continue to push pull projects you ve  forked

User · Answer

I think fork is a copy of other repository but with your account modification  for example  if you directly clone other repository locally  the remote object origin is still using the account who you clone from  You can t commit and contribute your code  It is just a pure copy of codes  Otherwise  If you fork a repository  it will clone the repo with the update of your account setting in you github account  And then cloning the repo in the context of your account  you can commit your codes

User · Answer

Apart from the fact that cloning is from server to your machine and forking is making a copy on the server itself  an important difference is that when we clone  we actually get all the branches  labels  etc   But when we fork  we actually only get the current files in the master branch  nothing other than that  This means we don t get the other branches  etc   Hence if you have to merge something back to the original repository  it is a inter-repository merge and will definitely need higher privileges   Fork is not a command in Git  it is just a concept which GitHub implements  Remember Git was designed to work in peer-to-peer environment without the need to synchronize stuff with any master copy  The server is just another peer  but we look at it as a master copy

[git] Are Git forks actually Git clones?

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