Comments on: Remember When “Fork” Was a Four-Letter Word? http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/236/ Clever name pending. Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:07:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2 Comment on Remember When “Fork” Was a Four-Letter Word? by: Matthew http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/236/#comment-36345 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:57:28 +0000 http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/236/#comment-36345 Thanks for emphasizing the distinction here, Jakub. Thanks for emphasizing the distinction here, Jakub.

]]> Comment on Remember When “Fork” Was a Four-Letter Word? by: Jakub Narebski http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/236/#comment-36344 Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:31:07 +0000 http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/236/#comment-36344 There is a difference between "true fork" which is meant to direct project in new direction (usually followed by changing name of the project, Emacs -> XEmacs, Arch -> ArX, GCC -> EGCS, XFree86 -> X.Org) and "so called fork" (by GitHub), which is just copy (clone) of repository, usually meaning just separate branch of development. So "most forked projects" on GitHub are just projects with largest number of branches / clones / independent contributors. (It is a bit strange that GitHub follows very early single-branch-per-repository ~= fork/tree paradigm). There is a difference between “true fork” which is meant to direct project in new direction (usually followed by changing name of the project, Emacs -> XEmacs, Arch -> ArX, GCC -> EGCS, XFree86 -> X.Org) and “so called fork” (by GitHub), which is just copy (clone) of repository, usually meaning just separate branch of development.

So “most forked projects” on GitHub are just projects with largest number of branches / clones / independent contributors. (It is a bit strange that GitHub follows very early single-branch-per-repository ~= fork/tree paradigm).

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