What is the difference between Forking and Cloning on GitHub?

Question

I\'d like to know the differences between doing a Fork of a project and doing a clone of it.

Can I only send pull requests via GitHub if I\'ve forked a

Answer 1

Basically, yes. A fork is just a request for GitHub to clone the project and registers it under your username; GitHub also keeps track of the relationship between the two repositories, so you can visualize the commits and pulls between the two projects (and other forks).

You can still request that people pull from your cloned repository, even if you don't use fork -- but you'd have to deal with making it publicly available yourself. Or send the developers patches (see git format-patch) that they can apply to their trees.