What is a fork in a software development?
A fork that is standard practice in many projects is stable or release versions which are modified only for bug fixes, while a development tree develops new features.
This is common practice in the Linux kernel, for instance, but has been misrepresented occasionally in the trade press as the more problematic sort of fork described above. Such forks are often referred to instead as “branches” both to avoid the negative connotations of a fork and because it is closer in intent and function to the common software engineering meaning of branching.
