Talk:Fork (software development)

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old talk

I am suggesting this page be wikified

Samba vs. Samba TNG - am I right in thinking TNG was blessed as Samba 3? And would that be an internal fork, or an external fork being blessed? - David Gerard 13:23, Jan 13, 2004 (UTC)

This article does not do justice to the sort of intentional forking that goes on regularly in both free and proprietary software projects; e.g., FreeBSD-CURRENT vs. FreeBSD-STABLE, Linux 2.x vs. Linux 2.(x+1), Cisco IOS 12.0 versus 12.0S versus 12.0T versus 12.1 versus 12.1S versus 12.1T versus 12.1B versus 12.2{,S,T,B} versus 12.3 ad nauseam. 18.24.0.120 05:05, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

From an article Code Forking, which I've redirected to Fork (software)"

Code forking is what occurs when code is taken by two different developers and developed independantly. The individual builds of the software constitute the forks which often do not share improvements and other changes made to other forks of the software.

Examples of this include the original Emule software ( http://emule-project.net ) and Emule Plus ( http://emuleplus.sourceforge.net/ ), which started as a mod of Emule and later stopped reintroducing their own updates into the official client. Instead they formed their own client and created a code fork.

(edit by article author): I went to the page that sent me to the blank "code forking" page and redirected the link to fork (software). It was under Software hoarding. I'm too lazy to add my meager example in the face of what's already in this article.

Is the forking of certain web syndication standards (e.g. RSS 0.9/1.0 vs. RSS 0.9x/2.0) within the scope of this article? A-giau 21:55, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Firefox has reached 1.0. Should it be declared the official Mozilla browser, then? -- Kizor 03:57, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Is this really still a stub? Stillnotelf 20:46, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone knowledgeable explain the rather oblique reference to Wikipedia forks? Natcolley 20:09, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Broader application

No doubt this phenomenon exists much more broadly than just computing/software development. Could we not then, make mentions of this in art, philosophy, etc...or even create a new page on this topic? ~ Dpr 08:24, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm game. Do you have any specific examples of that kind of usage? MFNickster 19:30, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Right off the top, I can say that what people think of as 'the' Baptist church is nothing but an ongoing series of forks. The Civil War split the Northern (now American) Baptists from the Southern. Of course black people had their own 'convention', which itself has repeatedly fractured. There are dozens if not hundreds of independent Baptist conventions out there. I doubt anybody really knows the number. Although generally speaking some are more 'liberal' than others, most of these church splits were more about ego, personality and power than theology. Can the same be said of the software development community? If so, then perhaps 'forking' should be filed under Psychology :-). Natcolley 20:06, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Webster forked the English language when he wrote his dictionary. Mao forked communism with his little red book. Saayiit (talk) 05:53, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikibook FORK

There is now (created) on Wikibooks a forking policy, it a approved policy but it still under debate Wikibooks:C++

Wikibook would be more correctly forking eBooks or Library Science Database than actually other people trying to copy him, which is totally not true and violating its own original research policies. I suspect Wikipedia is scandalous in deletion since a lot of AfD, TfD, and CfD have no backups and logs (which is irresponsible for security measures) and claims ownership of its Sister Projects and evade legal problems such as Fair Use Rationale policies probably, which doesn't even exists in the legal system. --75.154.186.241 (talk) 10:14, 18 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Spoons?

I've seen Ubuntu referred to as a "spoon" of Debian. What does this pun mean? Twinxor t 06:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably a semi-serious way of saying they're not a "true" fork. In other words, Ubuntu tries to stay on good terms, and in sync, with Debian, instead of diverging. --Piet Delport 10:28, 16 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Self-referencing

In passing, I noticed this page contains a self-reference to Wikipedia in the leader text. Could someone with a better, external example, change this per Wikipedia:Avoid self-references? Rob Church ^{Talk | FAD} 10:51, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a self-reference to Wikipedia, but rather Wikipedia talking about itself as an example, which is explicitly allowed by the source you site. The link to Wikipedia is even within the main namespace, so does not have to be changed to an external link style. I don't see anything that needs to be changed according to the rules about avoiding self-referencing. -- 68.252.13.201 14:30, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sections

I've cut the page up into sections. Do any more likely sections leap out to anyone's eyes? Also, this article could do with some solid referencing - David Gerard 01:04, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Article Bias

This article is heavily biased to Open Source and not enough information on true Proprietary software forking. Nor is there any information on approaches to forking Proprietary software. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kit105 (talk • contribs) 03:51, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

HoverRace.com's Fork of HoverRace

I'd like the users editing this article to help end the edit-war between a few users (myself included) on the HoverRace article. HoverRace was a shareware game originally designed/coded by GrokkSoft (Richard Langlois) in 1995/1996. Recently, Mr. Langlois released the source code to the last legally released version of HoverRace (1.01). GrokkSoft.com was the official website for HoverRace until it was abandoned. Once Langlois released the source code, HR.com began working on it to get it to compile, and recently to make what they consider improvements (most of which were not sanctioned or planned by Langlois). Once Langlois released the source code, he basically stopped bothering with the people at HR.com, except to remove the expiry from the source code license.

Now, HR.com are claiming that their fork of the original game is not a fork at all, but the official/original version.

Pleas note: HoverRace.com was never, and still is not the official website for HoverRace. It started in 1996 as a fan-site by a registered user of the game.

I'm thinking that I'm not wrong on this, but I could be. Regardless of whether I am right or wrong, I'd like for some of you to explain whether or not HoverRace.com's "version" of HoverRace is a fork or not on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development), please...64.230.16.234 (talk) 20:53, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]