this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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I love forks like this because they almost always last a long time.
yeah unless a core maintainer moves over too they're nothingburgers sadly. Anyone can make a fork has its benefits but not always!
forks are the software equivalent of party splits except somehow even pettier.
It can be more productive than trying to resolve conflicts internally. But yeah someone has to actually do the work.
In this case the fork was created by someone who has never worked on Calibre before and they haven't even cherry picked out the AI commits yet, only updated the readme.
See, this is how you know open source is communist, your favourite piece of software has the exact same sectarianism problems as your local Trots!
And the readmes, issue posts, and notes on merges are sort of like newspapers if you squint hard enough, too.
Some are certainly long enough or quibble-over-terminology enough to make a Trot paper blush... though they are usually a fair bit better on the signal to noise ratio, unless a maintainer's having an ideological rant they're often only long because software is complicated.
Not always, all PRs usually start as forks unless the person is part of the project and can do their work on a branch.
That's just a Githubism
Yeah, but it also makes "forking" into a more ambiguous term overall. A GitHub fork can be a clone with a working branch or an actual fork and it's not immediately obvious until you look at the code.
That's why I use the README test to see if a forked repo is an actual fork since almost no one will modify the README if their GitHub fork is actually a work branch.
Esoecially when it's a massive and from what I hear messily coded thing like Calibre. I've been looking for alternatives for a long time but nothing has the massive variety of features that Calibre has for library and book management.