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Comment by zagrebian | Hacker News Reader

> In general, the idea is that Edge developers check in their code to the internal Main branch. Code from Microsoft employees is joined by code pulled by the “pump” from the upstream Chromium project, with various sheriffs working around the clock to fix any merge conflicts between the upstream code pumped in and the code Microsoft engineers have added.

Source: https://textslashplain.com/2022/08/04/understanding-browser-...

Microsoft have their own branch, where they add Edge-specific changes, and they regularly pull changes from the Chromium source (probably not all changes) and merge them to their branch. If you don’t consider this a fork, then please explain why.

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Forks diverge. Blink is a fork of Webkit, but Blink hardly resembles Webkit anymore. Blink doesn't pull any changes from Webkit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

>Eric S. Raymond, in his essay Homesteading the Noosphere,[12] stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community"

At this point I just want to add that I'm not a developer and I don't actually know much, I just read stuff online. But yeah, Edge isn't a fork

Also from that Wikipedia article:

> Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch".[14] With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub, Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that the technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork" as its term for this method of contribution to a project.

On GitHub, if you fork somebody else’s repo, your version is called a fork. You don’t have to diverge. You don’t have to merge. You don’t have to do anything, but it’s still called a fork. Do you agree that this is how GitHub uses the term fork?

Yes, that's how GitHub calls it, but by calling everything a fork the term loses its meaning. By this definition every Chromium browser is a fork, which is just ridiculous. Edge's developers don't think of Edge as a fork

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