This discussion thread is hilarious (and adorable) to me. Makes me feel old (in a good way) that there are folks for whom the default meaning of "fork" is git(hub), rather than the unix fork syscall.
OHHH. Haha I had to read your comment before I understood the title. I knew they were talking about the fork syscall while reading the article, but I still assumed the title referred to "forking the compiler on GitHub, so that they could make it better and send a pull request."
It didn't click that the title was also talking about the fork() syscall. I think it's a pun though: "To try it yourself, check out the dmdforker branch in my dmd GitHub fork."
Double OHHH. Just realized upon reading your comment that I'd read the title/article the same way, and then forgotten. I guess “forking the D compiler” naturally leads to the source-forking context.
I guess I've learned to forget/ignore the titles on hackernews after using them to decide whether to click through, since they so often mess with them.
Hasn't the term 'fork' been overloaded long before GitHub (or even git)? Project forks have been a thing for as long as there have been open source projects...
That reminds me that "fork" when used as a verb on GitHub's UI should more accurately be "cloud clone".
GitHub's terminology has muddied the waters between the concept of actual forks (longterm divergent development) and a particular implementation of a permission system for branches.
We used to just call it a 'branch' because it was just another branch in the distributed revision tree. There is nothing special about a branch you create and commit to, whether it's by clicking on a picture on the screen or typing a command in a terminal.
Calling a branch a fork is just a water-muddying term probably coined by some suit in marketing who saw the buzzword somewhere in an article on the Internet Explorer and thought they would re-purposed to use as a product differentiator.
That's a second-order observation. We could use any noun for that if and when it's relevant - I suggest alternadoodley.
Like I said, "fork" already has a useful meaning with regard to an OSS project, so there's no need to overload it. Is the following sentence not confusing? When you fork on GitHub you create a fork but not every fork is a fork.
Put it this way, when the user presses the Fork button in the GitHub UI, is their intention to contribute to the project, or is it to create a competitor/alternative to the project.
I say the former situation is an obfuscated permission system and the latter is a fork.
[ I've gone rather off-topic from TFA so will stop commenting now! ]
