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This article discusses the difference between Form and Branch on GitHub. In the context of coding, the current era relies more on collaboration.

GitHub is one of the most commonly used collaboration tools. Forking and branching on GitHub are some of the most useful utilities when collaborating on a project.

However, the two have different use cases and meanings, as explained below.

The difference between forks and branches on GitHub

Forking on GitHub involves creating a copy of a public repository in your personal account. This concept encourages divergent evolution of the code base.

Divergent Evolution is ideal for those who wish to conduct extensive experiments on a single topic.

On the other hand, branching involves creating a branch from the origin. It encourages convergent evolution of the code base.

Most businesses prefer branching because of the positive impact it has on the productivity of the team.

Divergent and convergent evolution

You may have noticed that in the open source world, a code base may be split into two projects at the same time. Take the Linux code base as an example.

We now have several forks, such as Linux RedHat, but they all have a common ancestor. This is an example of divergent evolution of a code base.

It’s important to note that these iterations are not temporary development paths that will never merge into one another.

On the other hand, branches are temporary development paths. When code is merged into the master branch, the branch is short-lived.

That's why they encourage convergent evolution of code bases.

Fork creates a new repository

GitHub makes it easy to create a branch with the click of a button. This action creates a copy of the repository at the time of forking.

When is the best time to fork?

This is when you want to create a standalone project without intending to regroup it with its parent project.

You may come across a project on GitHub that would be a great starting point for your project. At moments like these, forking would be most ideal.

Fork on GitHub

Branches act as build zones in your codebase. We use branches to work on features temporarily with the goal of merging with origin.

To create a branch on GitHub , go to View All Branches and click New Branch.

To create a new branch locally, we use git checkoutthe command as shown below.

$ git checkout -b <新分支>

How much does forking and branching cost?

Merging branches is easier and faster because Git only compares the files that have changed. Forking, on the other hand, can be considered more expensive.

When merging a branch with its original parent, Git has to compare the two repositories.

请记住, forking creates a copy of the entire parent repository.

The file size of the new branch will vary depending on the parent branch. Forking will take up more space on the remote server.

Businesses are encouraged to establish branches as this improves visibility and reduces operational risks.

Here are the reasons:

Let's say we have a team of ten people working on different features in a project. When each developer creates a branch, we will have ten different and independent repositories.

This will make it difficult to see what everyone is working on unless you have all 10 repositories in one place.

This is not a true collaborative environment because code changes exist in ten different repositories.

If developers choose ten different branches instead of forking, it will be more of a collaborative space because all commits are in one repository. This argument caters to the issue of visibility.

When we talk about operational risk, let's say a developer creates ten forks and one or two of them are unavailable for some reason. This introduces a knowledge management risk where the other developers won't know where the other developers have arrived.

This isn't always the case, but it's still possible to avoid this risk by adopting a branch-centric workflow.

A branch-centric workflow is best suited for business environments, while forking is best suited for public collaboration and experimentation. If you are both working towards a common goal, choose a branch-centric workflow.