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

Answer 1

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.