CODEWITHSUNDEEP
github
Hybras
Hybras

Reputation: 71

What is the purpose of a trivial fork of a repo?

Define "trivial fork": A fork that can be fast forwarded to the upstream repo. (perhaps there is an existing term)

Here is an example: the rust repository has ~8k forks.
Many of these are trivial forks. The number of forks (trivial or not) seems to correlate with how popular a project is.

What is the purpose of these trivial forks?

I assume some contain merged work (ie they were not always trivial), and some were intended to have work done in them, but the forkers forgot / moved on.
But this does not seem adequate to explain all of these trivial forks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 35

Answers (1)

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1323203

Beside "bookmarking" (which is better done with "stars"), and misclicks (you want to see the forks, but click on "fork" by mistake, and end-up with a fork!), trivial forks represents intent to collaborate.

Some of those forks have branches of their own where experiment/possible patches are done.

But as long as the master/main or the original upstream repository is not involved in an active PR, those forks would remain "trivial".

Upvotes: 1

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