Fork & Pull

There are various collaboration models that a project can use for developers to work together on code. A project will declare its model and stick with it. The MDI uses the model known as “Fork & Pull” or the “Forking Workflow”.

Open source code projects

Understanding the Fork & Pull collaboration model requires a basic understanding of Open Source software, which means that the code for a project is publicly available for others to see and use, according to license grants beyond the scope of this tutorial.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

On GitHub, this means that a developer has set the status of a code repository to “Public”. For example, the content for this Basic Training web site is a public repo distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

• https://github.com/MiDataInt/mdi-basic-training

Learn the basics

As always, there are many internet resources to help you understand forking and pulling into a git code repository.

• https://www.google.com/search?q=git+fork+and+pull

The concepts you want to understand are that:

• Project maintainers control the code in the “definitive” repository
• Code developers:
  • fork a copy of the repo to their own GitHub account
  • clone their fork of the code to their local computer
  • edit code toward some purpose
  • push their changes to their fork, in their own GitHub account
  • make a “pull request” to the project maintainers to have their code incorporated into the definitive repository

The next Exercise will walk you through these steps.

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