Erich Blume 6ecfaf02b6 Add spork strategy: tooling and documentation

Spork-create mise task sets up a floating-branch soft-fork of a
mirrored upstream project with daily mirror-sync via Forgejo Actions.
Includes explanation card, how-to guides for setup and branch
management, and the spork-create uv script.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-03-28 22:58:10 -07:00

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Spork Strategy

Note: This article was drafted by AI and reviewed by Erich. I plan to rewrite all explanatory content in my own words - these serve as placeholders to establish the documentation structure.

A "spork" is a floating-branch soft-fork strategy for maintaining local changes against upstream projects without creating a true fork. The name: a fork that's trying its hardest not to be one.

The problem

We mirror upstream projects on forge for supply-chain control. Sometimes we need to carry local patches — workflow support, build tooling, bug fixes. A real fork diverges silently until merge day becomes a nightmare. A spork stays perpetually close to upstream with patches "floating" on top, rebased daily.

The trade-off

A spork chooses "small frequent pain" (constant rebasing, shifting branch targets) over "rare catastrophic pain" (fork divergence). For a solo operator carrying a handful of patches, this is the right trade-off. The key property: git log main..blumeops always shows your complete delta from upstream. No mystery divergence.

Long-lived work against a sporked repo must accept that there is no "safe" branch — everything is an ever-shifting target. Anyone with a local checkout needs to be comfortable with git pull --rebase.

Architecture

Three remotes, five branch types, one daily sync workflow. The blumeops branch is the default — it looks just like upstream with local workflows overlaid. Feature branches come in two flavors: upstreamable (branched off main, clean for contribution) and non-upstreamable (branched off blumeops, local-only). A deploy branch merges everything together as a build artifact.

Forgejo Actions only checks .forgejo/workflows/ when that directory exists, so upstream's .github/workflows/ won't run on forge — no deletion needed. If upstream has its own .forgejo/ directory (rare), it's removed during spork setup.

How-to guides

create-a-spork — initial setup with mise run spork-create
manage-spork-branches — feature branches, the deploy branch, handling rebase conflicts

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