<title>Branching, Forking, Merging, and Tagging</title>
<h2>Background</h2>

In a simple and perfect world, the development of a project would proceed
linearly, as shown in Figure 1.

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
ALL: [circle rad 0.1in thickness 1.5px "1"
arrow right 40%
circle same "2"
arrow same
circle same "3"
arrow same
circle same "4"]
box invis "Figure 1" big fit with .n at .3cm below ALL.s
</verbatim>

Each circle represents a check-in.  For the sake of clarity, the check-ins
are given small consecutive numbers.  In a real system, of course, the
check-in numbers would be long hexadecimal hashes since it is not possible
to allocate collision-free sequential numbers in a distributed system.
But as sequential numbers are easier to read, we will substitute them for
the long hashes in this document.

The arrows in Figure 1 show the evolution of a project.  The initial
check-in is 1.  Check-in 2 is derived from 1.  In other words, check-in 2
was created by making edits to check-in 1 and then committing those edits.
We say that 2 is a <i>child</i> of 1
and that 1 is a <i>parent</i> of 2.
Check-in 3 is derived from check-in 2, making
3 a child of 2.  We say that 3 is a <i>descendant</i> of both 1 and 2 and that 1
and 2 are both <i>ancestors</i> of 3.

<h2 id="dag">DAGs</h2>

The graph of check-ins is a
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph | directed acyclic graph],
commonly shortened to <i>DAG</i>.  Check-in 1 is the <i>root</i> of the DAG
since it has no ancestors.  Check-in 4 is a <i>leaf</i> of the DAG since
it has no descendants.  (We will give a more precise definition later of
"leaf.")

Alas, reality often interferes with the simple linear development of a
project.  Suppose two programmers make independent modifications to check-in 2.
After both changes are committed, the check-in graph looks like Figure 2:

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
ALL: [circle rad 0.1in thickness 1.5px "1"
arrow right 40%
circle same "2"
circle same "3" at 2nd circle+(.4,.3)
arrow from 2nd circle to 3rd circle chop
circle same "4" at 2nd circle+(.4,-.3)
arrow from 2nd circle to 4th circle chop]
box invis "Figure 2" big fit with .n at .3cm below ALL.s
</verbatim>

The graph in Figure 2 has two leaves: check-ins 3 and 4.  Check-in 2 has
two children, check-ins 3 and 4.  We call this state a <i>fork</i>.

Fossil tries to prevent forks, primarily through its
"[./concepts.wiki#workflow | autosync]" mechanism.

Suppose two programmers named Alice and
Bob are each editing check-in 2 separately. Alice finishes her edits
and commits her changes first, resulting in check-in 3. When Bob later
attempts to commit his changes, Fossil verifies that check-in 2 is still
a leaf. Fossil sees that check-in 3 has occurred and aborts Bob's commit
attempt with a message "would fork." This allows Bob to do a "fossil
update" to pull in Alice's changes, merging them into his own
changes. After merging, Bob commits check-in 4 as a child of check-in 3.
The result is a linear graph as shown in Figure 1. This is how CVS
works. This is also how Fossil works in autosync mode.

But perhaps Bob is off-network when he does his commit, so he has no way
of knowing that Alice has already committed her changes.  Or, it could
be that Bob has turned off "autosync" mode in Fossil.  Or, maybe Bob
just doesn't want to merge in Alice's changes before he has saved his
own, so he forces the commit to occur using the "--allow-fork" option to
the <b>[/help?cmd=commit | fossil commit]</b> command.  For any of these
reasons, two commits against check-in 2 have occurred, so the DAG now
has two leaves.

In such a condition, a person working with this repository has a
dilemma: which version of the project is the "latest" in the sense of
having the most features and the most bug fixes?  When there is more
than one leaf in the graph, you don't really know, which is why we
would ideally prefer to have linear check-in graphs.

Fossil resolves such problems using the check-in time on the leaves to
decide which leaf to use as the parent of new leaves.  When a branch is
forked as in Figure 2, Fossil will choose check-in 4 as the parent for a
later check-in 5, but <i>only</i> if it has sync'd that check-in down
into the local repository. If autosync is disabled or the user is
off-network when that fifth check-in occurs so that check-in 3 is the
latest on that branch at the time within that clone of the repository,
Fossil will make check-in 3 the parent of check-in 5! We show practical
consequences of this [#bad-fork | later in this article].

Fossil also uses a forked branch's leaf check-in timestamps when
checking out that branch: it gives you the fork with the latest
check-in, which in turn selects which parent your next check-in will be
a child of.  This situation means development on that branch can fork
into two independent lines of development, based solely on which branch
tip is newer at the time the next user starts his work on it.

Because of these potential problems, we strongly recommend that you do
not intentionally create forks on long-lived shared working branches
with "--allow-fork".  (Prime example: trunk.) The inverse case —
intentional forks on short-lived single-developer branches — is far
easier to justify, since presumably the lone developer is never confused
about why there are two or more leaves on that branch. Further
justifications for intentional forking are [#forking | given below].

Let us return to Figure 2. To resolve such situations before they can
become a real problem, Alice can use the <b>[/help?cmd=merge | fossil
merge]</b> command to merge Bob's changes into her local copy of
check-in 3. Without arguments, that command merges all leaves on the
current branch. Alice can then verify that the merge is sensible and if
so, commit the results as check-in 5.  This results in a DAG as shown in
Figure 3.

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
ALL: [circle rad 0.1in thickness 1.5px "1"
arrow right 40%
circle same "2"
circle same "3" at 2nd circle+(.4,.3)
arrow from 2nd circle to 3rd circle chop
circle same "4" at 2nd circle+(.4,-.3)
arrow from 2nd circle to 4th circle chop
circle same "5" at 3rd circle+(.4,-.3)
arrow from 3rd circle to 5th circle chop
arrow dashed .03 from 4th circle to 5th circle chop]
box invis "Figure 3" big fit with .n at .2cm below ALL.s
</verbatim>

Check-in 5 is a child of check-in 3 because it was created by editing
check-in 3, but since check-in 5 also inherits the changes from check-in 4 by
virtue of the merge, we say that check-in 5 is a <i>merge child</i>
of check-in 4 and that it is a <i>direct child</i> of check-in 3.
The graph is now back to a single leaf, check-in 5.

We have already seen that if Fossil is in autosync mode then Bob would
have been warned about the potential fork the first time he tried to
commit check-in 4.  If Bob had updated his local check-out to merge in
Alice's check-in 3 changes, then committed, the fork would have
never occurred.  The resulting graph would have been linear, as shown
in Figure 1.

Realize that the graph of Figure 1 is a subset of Figure 3. If you hold your
hand over the ④ in Figure 3, it looks
exactly like Figure 1 except that the leaf has a different check-in
number. That is just a notational difference: the two check-ins
have exactly the same content.

Inversely, Figure 3 is a
superset of Figure 1.  The check-in 4 of Figure 3 captures additional
state which is omitted from Figure 1.  Check-in 4 of Figure 3 holds a
copy of Bob's local checkout before he merged in Alice's changes.  That
snapshot of Bob's changes, which is independent of Alice's changes, is
omitted from Figure 1.

Some people say that the development approach taken in
Figure 3 is better because it preserves this extra intermediate state.
Others say that the approach taken in Figure 1 is better because it is
much easier to visualize linear development and because the
merging happens automatically instead of as a separate manual step.  We
will not take sides in that debate.  We will simply point out that
Fossil enables you to do it either way.

<h2 id="branching">The Alternative to Forking: Branching</h2>

Having more than one leaf in the check-in DAG is called a "fork." This
is usually undesirable and either avoided entirely,
as in Figure 1, or else quickly resolved as shown in Figure 3.
But sometimes, one does want to have multiple leaves.  For example, a project
might have one leaf that is the latest version of the project under
development and another leaf that is the latest version that has been
tested.
When multiple leaves are desirable, we call this <i>branching</i>
instead of <i>forking</i>:

Figure 4 shows an example of a project where there are two branches, one
for development work and another for testing.

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
ALL: [circle rad 0.1in thickness 1.5px fill white "1"
arrow 40%
C2: circle same "2"
arrow same
circle same "3"
arrow same
C5: circle same "5"
arrow same
C7: circle same "7"
arrow same
C8: circle same "8"
arrow same
C10: circle same "10"
C4: circle same at 3rd circle-(0,.35) "4"
C6: circle same at (1/2 way between C5 and C7,C4) "6"
C9: circle same at (1/2 way between C8 and C10,C4) "9"
arrow from C2 to C4 chop
arrow from C4 to C6 chop
arrow from C6 to C9 chop
arrow dashed 0.03 from C6 to C7 chop
arrow same from C9 to C10
layer = 0
box fill 0x9bcdfc color 0x9bcdfc wid (C10.e.x - C2.w.x) ht C6.height*1.5 at C6.c
box invis "test" fit with .sw at last box.sw]
box invis "Figure 4" big with .n at 0 below ALL.s
</verbatim>

Figure 4 diagrams the following scenario: the project starts and
progresses to a point where (at check-in 2)
it is ready to enter testing for its first release.
In a real project, of course, there might be hundreds or thousands of
check-ins before a project reaches this point, but for simplicity of
presentation we will say that the project is ready after check-in 2.
The project then splits into two branches that are used by separate
teams.  The testing team, using the blue branch, finds and fixes a few
bugs with check-ins 6 and 9.  Meanwhile, the development
team, working on the top uncolored branch,
is busy adding features for the second
release.  Of course, the development team would like to take advantage of
the bug fixes implemented by the testing team, so periodically the
changes in the test branch are merged into the dev branch.  This is
shown by the dashed merge arrows between check-ins 6 and 7 and between
check-ins 9 and 10.

In both Figures 2 and 4, check-in 2 has two children.  In Figure 2,
we call this a "fork."  In diagram 4, we call it a "branch."  What is
the difference?  As far as the internal Fossil data structures are
concerned, there is no difference.  The distinction is in the intent.
In Figure 2, the fact that check-in 2 has multiple children is an
accident that stems from concurrent development.  In Figure 4, giving
check-in 2 multiple children is a deliberate act.  To a good
approximation, we define forking to be by accident and branching to
be by intent.  Apart from that, they are the same.

When the fork is intentional, it helps humans to understand what is
going on if we <i>name</i> the forks. This is not essential to Fossil's
internal data model, but humans have trouble working with long-lived
branches identified only by the commit ID currently at its tip, being a
long string of hex digits.  Therefore, Fossil conflates two concepts:
branching as intentional forking and the naming of forks as branches.
They are in fact separate concepts, but since Fossil is intended to be
used primarily by humans, we combine them in Fossil's human user
interfaces.

<p class="blockquote">
<b>Key Distinction:</b> A branch is a <i>named, intentional</i> fork.
</p>

Unnamed forks <i>may</i> be intentional, but most of the time, they're
accidental and left unnamed.

Fossil offers two primary ways to create named, intentional forks,
a.k.a. branches. First:

<pre>
$ fossil commit --branch my-new-branch-name
</pre>

This is the method we recommend for most cases: it creates a branch as
part of a check-in using the version in the current checkout directory
as its basis. (This is normally the tip of the current branch, though
it doesn't have to be. You can create a branch from an ancestor check-in
on a branch as well.) After making this branch-creating
check-in, your local working directory is switched to that branch, so
that further check-ins occur on that branch as well, as children of the
tip check-in on that branch.

The second, more complicated option is:

<pre>
$ fossil branch new my-new-branch-name trunk
$ fossil update my-new-branch-name
$ fossil commit
</pre>

Not only is this three commands instead of one, the first of which is
longer than the entire simpler command above, you must give the second command
before creating any check-ins, because until you do, your local working
directory remains on the same branch it was on at the time you issued
the command, so that the commit would otherwise put the new material on
the original branch instead of the new one.

In addition to those problems, the second method is a violation of the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it|YAGNI
Principle]. We recommend that you wait until you actually need the
branch before you create it using the first command above.

The "trunk" is just another named branch in Fossil. It is simply
the default branch name for the first check-in and every check-in made as
one of its direct descendants. It is special only in that it is Fossil's
default when it has no better idea of which branch you mean.


<h2 id="forking">Justifications For Forking</h2>

The primary cases where forking is justified over branching are all when
it is done purely in software in order to avoid losing information:

<ol>
    <li><p id="offline">By Fossil itself when two users check in children to the same
    leaf of a branch, as in Figure 2.
    <br><br>
    If the fork occurs because
    autosync is disabled on one or both of the repositories or because
    the user doing the check-in has no network connection at the moment
    of the commit, Fossil has no way of knowing that it is creating a
    fork until the two repositories are later synchronized.</p></li>

    <li><p id="dist-clone">By Fossil when the cloning hierarchy is more
    than 2 levels deep.
    <br><br>
    [./sync.wiki|Fossil's synchronization protocol] is a two-party
    negotiation; syncs don't automatically propagate up the clone tree
    beyond that. Because of that, if you have a master repository and
    Alice clones it, then Bobby clones from Alice's repository, a
    check-in by Bobby that autosyncs with Alice's repo will <i>not</i>
    also autosync with the master repo. The master doesn't get a copy of
    Bobby's check-in until Alice <i>separately</i> syncs with the master.
    If Carol cloned from the master repo and checks something in that
    creates a fork relative to Bobby's check-in, the master repo won't
    know about that fork until Alice syncs her repo with the master.
    Even then, realize that Carol still won't know about the fork until
    she subsequently syncs with the master repo.
    <br><br>
    One way to deal with this is to just accept it as a fact of using a
    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control|Distributed
    Version Control System] like Fossil.
    <br><br>
    Another option, which we recommend you consider carefully, is to
    make it a local policy that check-ins be made only directly against the master
    repo or one of its immediate child clones so that the autosync
    algorithm can do its job most effectively. Any clones deeper than
    that should be treated as read-only and thus get a copy of the new
    state of the world only once these central repos have negotiated
    that new state. This policy avoids a class of inadvertent fork you
    might not need to tolerate.  Since [#bad-fork|forks on long-lived
    shared working branches can end up dividing a team's development
    effort], a team may easily justify this restriction on distributed
    cloning.</p></li>

    <li><p id="automation">You've automated Fossil, so you use
    <b>fossil commit --allow-fork</b> commands to prevent Fossil from
    refusing the check-in simply because it would create a fork.
    <br><br>
    If you are writing such a tool — e.g. a shell script to make
    multiple manipulations on a Fossil repo — it's better to make it
    smart enough to detect this condition and cope with it, such as
    by making a call to <b>[/help?cmd=update | fossil update]</b>
    and checking for a merge conflict. That said, if the alternative is
    losing information, you may feel justified in creating forks that an
    interactive user must later manually clean up with <b>fossil merge</b>
    commands.</p></li>
</ol>

That leaves only one case where we can recommend use of "--allow-fork"
by interactive users: when you're working on a personal branch so that
creating a dual-tipped branch isn't going to cause any other user an
inconvenience or risk [#bad-fork | inadvertently forking the development
effort]. In such a case, the lone developer working on that branch is
not confused, since the fork in development is intentional. Sometimes it
simply makes no sense to bother creating a name, cluttering the global
branch namespace, simply to convert an intentional fork into a "branch."
This is especially the case when the fork is short-lived.

There's a common generalization of that case: you're a solo developer,
so that the problems with branching vs forking simply don't matter. In
that case, feel free to use "--allow-fork" as much as you like.


<h2 id="fix">Fixing Forks</h2>

If your local checkout is on a forked branch, you can usually fix a fork
automatically with:

<pre>
$ fossil merge
</pre>

Normally you need to pass arguments to <b>fossil merge</b> to tell it
what you want to merge into the current basis view of the repository,
but without arguments, the command seeks out and fixes forks.


<h2 id="tags">Tags And Properties</h2>

Tags and properties are used in Fossil to help express the intent, and
thus to distinguish between forks and branches.  Figure 5 shows the
same scenario as Figure 4 but with tags and properties added:

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
ALL: [arrowht = 0.07
C1: circle rad 0.1in thickness 1.5px fill white "1"
arrow 40%
C2: circle same "2"
arrow same
circle same "3"
arrow same
C5: circle same "5"
arrow same
C7: circle same "7"
arrow same
C8: circle same "8"
arrow same
C10: circle same "10"
C4: circle same at 3rd circle-(0,.35) "4"
C6: circle same at (1/2 way between C5 and C7,C4) "6"
C9: circle same at (1/2 way between C8 and C10,C4) "9"
arrow from C2 to C4 chop
arrow from C4 to C6 chop
arrow from C6 to C9 chop
arrow dashed 0.03 from C6 to C7 chop
arrow same from C9 to C10
layer = 0
box fill 0x9bcdfc color 0x9bcdfc wid (C10.e.x - C2.w.x) ht C6.height*1.5 at C6.c
text " test" above ljust at last box.sw
box fill lightgray "branch=trunk" "sym-trunk" fit with .ne at C1-(0.05,0.3);
line color gray from last box.ne to C1 chop
box same "branch=test" "sym-test" "bgcolor=blue" "cancel=sym-trunk" fit \
   with .n at C4-(0,0.3)
line color gray from last box.n to C4 chop
box same "sym-release-1.0" "closed" fit with .n at C9-(0,0.3)
line color gray from last box.n to C9 chop]
box invis "Figure 5" big fit with .n at 0.2cm below ALL.s
</verbatim>

A <i>tag</i> is a name that is attached to a check-in.  A
<i>property</i> is a name/value pair.  Internally, Fossil implements
tags as properties with a NULL value.  So, tags and properties really
are much the same thing, and henceforth we will use the word "tag"
to mean either a tag or a property.

A tag can be a one-time tag, a propagating tag or a cancellation tag.
A one-time tag only applies to the check-in to which it is attached.  A
propagating tag applies to the check-in to which it is attached and also
to all direct descendants of that check-in.  A <i>direct descendant</i>
is a descendant through direct children.  Tag propagation does not
cross merges.  Tag propagation also stops as soon
as it encounters another check-in with the same tag.  A cancellation tag
is attached to a single check-in in order to either override a one-time
tag that was previously placed on that same check-in, or to block
tag propagation from an ancestor.

The initial check-in of every repository has two propagating tags.  In
Figure 5, that initial check-in is check-in 1.  The <b>branch</b> tag
tells (by its value)  what branch the check-in is a member of.
The default branch is called "trunk."  All tags that begin with "<b>sym-</b>"
are symbolic name tags.  When a symbolic name tag is attached to a
check-in, that allows you to refer to that check-in by its symbolic
name rather than by its hexadecimal hash name.  When a symbolic name
tag propagates (as does the <b>sym-trunk</b> tag) then referring to that
name is the same as referring to the most recent check-in with that name.
Thus the two tags on check-in 1 cause all descendants to be in the
"trunk" branch and to have the symbolic name "trunk."

Check-in 4 has a <b>branch</b> tag which changes the name of the branch
to "test."  The branch tag on check-in 4 propagates to check-ins 6 and 9.
But because tag propagation does not follow merge links, the <b>branch=test</b>
tag does not propagate to check-ins 7, 8, or 10.  Note also that the
<b>branch</b> tag on check-in 4 blocks the propagation of <b>branch=trunk</b>
so that it cannot reach check-ins 6 or 9.  This causes check-ins 4, 6, and
9 to be in the "test" branch and all others to be in the "trunk" branch.

Check-in 4 also has a <b>sym-test</b> tag, which gives the symbolic name
"test" to check-ins 4, 6, and 9.  Because tags do not propagate across
merges, check-ins 7, 8, and 10 do not inherit the <b>sym-test</b> tag and
are hence not known by the name "test."
To prevent the <b>sym-trunk</b> tag from propagating from check-in 1
into check-ins 4, 6, and 9, there is a cancellation tag for
<b>sym-trunk</b> on check-in 4.  The net effect is that
check-ins on the trunk go by the symbolic name of "trunk" and check-ins
on the test branch go by the symbolic name "test."

The <b>bgcolor=blue</b> tag on check-in 4 causes the background color
of timelines to be blue for check-in 4 and its direct descendants.

Figure 5 also shows two one-time tags on check-in 9.  (The diagram does
not make a graphical distinction between one-time and propagating tags.)
The <b>sym-release-1.0</b> tag means that check-in 9 can be referred to
using the more meaningful name "release-1.0."  The <b>closed</b> tag means
that check-in 9 is a "closed leaf."  A closed leaf is a leaf that should
never have direct children.

<h2 id="bad-fork">How Can Forks Divide Development Effort?</h2>

[#dist-clone|Above], we stated that forks carry a risk that development
effort on a branch can be divided among the forks. It might not be
immediately obvious why this is so. To see it, consider this swim lane
diagram:

<verbatim type="pikchr center toggle">
    $laneh = 0.75

ALL: [
    # Draw the lanes
    down
    box width 3.5in height $laneh fill 0xacc9e3
    box same fill 0xc5d8ef
    box same as first box
    box same as 2nd box
    line from 1st box.sw+(0.2,0) up until even with 1st box.n \
      "Alan" above aligned
    line from 2nd box.sw+(0.2,0) up until even with 2nd box.n \
      "Betty" above aligned
    line from 3rd box.sw+(0.2,0) up until even with 3rd box.n \
      "Charlie" above aligned
    line from 4th box.sw+(0.2,0) up until even with 4th box.n \
       "Darlene" above aligned

    # fill in content for the Alice lane
    right
A1: circle rad 0.1in at end of first line + (0.2,-0.2) \
       fill white thickness 1.5px "1" 
    arrow right 50%
    circle same "2"
    arrow right until even with first box.e - (0.65,0.0)
    ellipse "future" fit fill white height 0.2 width 0.5 thickness 1.5px
A3: circle same at A1+(0.8,-0.3) "3" fill 0xc0c0c0
    arrow from A1 to last circle chop "fork!" below aligned

    # content for the Betty lane
B1: circle same as A1 at A1-(0,$laneh) "1"
    arrow right 50%
    circle same "2"
    arrow right until even with first ellipse.w
    ellipse same "future"
B3: circle same at A3-(0,$laneh) "3"
    arrow right 50%
    circle same as A3 "4"
    arrow from B1 to 2nd last circle chop

    # content for the Charlie lane
C1: circle same as A1 at B1-(0,$laneh) "1"
    arrow 50%
    circle same "2"
    arrow right 0.8in "goes" "offline"
C5: circle same as A3 "5"
    arrow right until even with first ellipse.w \
      "back online" above "pushes 5" below "pulls 3 &amp; 4" below 
    ellipse same "future"

    # content for the Darlene lane
D1: circle same as A1 at C1-(0,$laneh) "1"
    arrow 50%
    circle same "2"
    arrow right until even with C5.w
    circle same "5"
    arrow 50%
    circle same as A3 "6"
    arrow right until even with first ellipse.w
    ellipse same "future"
D3: circle same as B3 at B3-(0,2*$laneh) "3"
    arrow 50%
    circle same "4"
    arrow from D1 to D3 chop
]
box invis "Figure 6" big fit with .n at 0.2cm below ALL.s
</verbatim>

This is a happy, cooperating team. That is an important restriction on
our example, because you must understand that this sort of problem can
arise without any malice, selfishness, or willful ignorance in sight.
All users on this diagram start out with the same view of the
repository, cloned from the same master repo, and all of them are
working toward their shared vision of a unified future.

All users, except possibly Alan, start out with the same two initial
check-ins in their local working clones, 1 & 2. It might be that Alan
starts out with only check-in 1 in his local clone, but we'll deal with
that detail later.

It doesn't matter which branch this happy team is working on, only that
our example makes the most sense if you think of it as a long-lived shared
working branch like trunk. Each user makes
only one check-in, shaded light gray in the diagram.

<h3 id="bf-alan">Step 1: Alan</h3>

Alan sets the stage for this problem by creating a
fork from check-in 1 as check-in 3. How and why Alan did this doesn't
affect what happens next, though we will walk through the possible cases
and attempt to assign blame [#post-mortem|in the <i>post mortem</i>].
For now, you can assume that Alan did this out of unavoidable ignorance.

<h3 id="bf-betty">Step 2: Betty</h3>

Because Betty's local clone is autosyncing with
the same upstream repository as Alan's clone, there are a number of ways
she can end up seeing Alan's check-in 3 as the latest on that branch:

<ol>
    <li><p>The working check-out directory she's using at the moment was
    on a different branch at the time Alan made check-in 3, so Fossil
    sees that as the tip at the time she switches her working directory
    to that branch with a <b>fossil update $BRANCH</b> command. (There is an
    implicit autosync in that command, if the option was enabled at the
    time of the update.)</p></li>

    <li><p>The same thing, only in a fresh checkout directory with a
    <b>[/help?cmd=open | fossil open $REPO $BRANCH]</b> command.</p></li>

    <li><p>Alan makes his check-in 3 while Betty has check-in 1 or 2 as
    the tip in her local clone, but because she's working with an
    autosync'd connection to the same upstream repository as Alan, on
    attempting what will become check-in 4, she gets the "would fork"
    message from <b>fossil commit</b>, so she dutifully updates her clone
    and tries again, moving her work to be a child of the new tip,
    check-in 3. (If she doesn't update, she creates a <i>second</i>
    fork, which simply complicates matters beyond what we need here for
    our illustration.)</p></li>
</ol>

For our purposes here, it doesn't really matter which one happened. All
that matters is that Alan's check-in 3 becomes the parent of Betty's
check-in 4 because it was the newest tip of the working branch at the
time Betty does her check-in.

<h3 id="bf-charlie">Step 3: Charlie</h3>

Meanwhile, Charlie went offline after syncing
his repo with check-in 2 as the latest on that branch. When he checks
his changes in, it is as a child of 2, not of 4, because Charlie doesn't
know about check-ins 3 & 4 yet.  He does this at an absolute wall clock
time <i>after</i> Alan and Betty made their check-ins, so when Charlie
comes back online and pushes his check-in 5 to the master repository and
learns about check-ins 3 and 4 during Fossil sync, Charlie inadvertently
revives the other side of the fork.

<h3 id="bf-darlene">Step 4: Darlene</h3>

Darlene sees all of this, because she joins in
on the work on this branch after Alan, Betty, and Charlie made their
check-ins and pushed them to the master repository. She's taking one of
the same three steps as we [#bf-betty|outlined for Betty above].
Regardless of her path to this view, it happens after Charlie pushed his
check-in 5 to the master repo, so Darlene sees that as the latest on the
branch, causing her work to be saved as a child of check-in 5, not of
check-in 4, as it would if Charlie didn't come back online and sync
before Darlene started work on that branch.

<h3 id="post-mortem">Post Mortem</h3>

The end result of all of this is that even though everyone makes only one check-in
and no one disables autosync without genuine need,
half of the check-ins end up on one side of the fork and half on
the other.

A future user — his mother calls him Edward, but please call him Eddie —
can then join in on the work on this branch and end up on <i>either</i> side of
the fork. If Eddie joins in with the state of the repository as drawn
above, he'll end up on the top side of the fork, because check-in 6 is
the latest, but if Alan or Betty makes a seventh check-in to that branch
first, it will be as a child of check-in 4 since that's the version in
their local check-out directories. Since that check-in 7 will then be the latest,
Eddie will end up on the bottom side of the fork instead.

In all of this, realize that neither side of the fork is obviously
"correct." Every participant was doing the right thing by their own
lights at the time they made their lone check-in.

Who, then, is to blame?

We can only blame the consequences of creating the fork on Alan if he
did so on purpose, as by passing "--allow-fork" when creating a check-in
on a shared working branch. Alan might have created it inadvertently by
going offline while check-in 1 was the tip of the branch in his local
clone, so that by the time he made his check-in 3, check-in 2 had
arrived at the shared parent repository from someone else. (Francine?)
When Alan rejoins the network and does an autosync, he learns about
check-in 2. Since his #3 is already checked into his local clone because
autosync was off or blocked, the sync creates an unavoidable fork.  We
can't blame either Alan or Francine here: they were both doing the right
thing given their imperfect view of the state of the global situation.

The same is true of Betty, Charlie, and Darlene. None of them tried to
create a fork, and none of them chose a side in this fork to participate
in. They just took Fossil's default and assumed it was correct.

The only blame I can assign here is on any of these users who believed
forks couldn't happen before this did occur, and I blame them only for
their avoidable ignorance. (You, dear reader, have been ejected from
that category by reading this very document.) Any time someone can work
without getting full coordination from every other clone of the repo,
forks are possible.  Given enough time, they're all but inevitable. This
is a general property of DVCSes, not just of Fossil.

This sort of consequence is why forks on shared working branches are
bad, which is why [./concepts.wiki#workflow|Fossil tries so hard to avoid them], why it warns you
about it when they do occur, and why it makes it relatively [#fix|quick and
painless to fix them] when they do occur.


<h2>Review Of Terminology</h2>

<dl>
<dt><b>Branch</b></dt>
<dd><p>A branch is a set of check-ins with the same value for their
"branch" property.</p></dd>
<dt><b>Leaf</b></dt>
<dd><p>A leaf is a check-in with no children in the same branch.</p></dd>
<dt><b>Closed Leaf</b></dt>
<dd><p>A closed leaf is any leaf with the <b>closed</b> tag.  These leaves
are intended to never be extended with descendants and hence are omitted
from lists of leaves in the command-line and web interface.</p></dd>
<dt><b>Open Leaf</b></dt>
<dd><p>A open leaf is a leaf that is not closed.</p></dd>
<dt><b>Fork</b></dt>
<dd><p>A fork is when a check-in has two or more direct (non-merge)
children in the same branch.</p></dd>
<dt><b>Branch Point</b></dt>
<dd><p>A branch point occurs when a check-in has two or more direct (non-merge)
children in different branches.  A branch point is similar to a fork,
except that the children are in different branches.</p></dd>
</dl>

Check-in 4 of Figure 3 is not a leaf because it has a child (check-in 5)
in the same branch.  Check-in 9 of Figure 5 also has a child (check-in 10)
but that child is in a different branch, so check-in 9 is a leaf.  Because
of the <b>closed</b> tag on check-in 9, it is a closed leaf.

Check-in 2 of Figure 3 is considered a "fork"
because it has two children in the same branch.  Check-in 2 of Figure 5
also has two children, but each child is in a different branch, hence in
Figure 5, check-in 2 is considered a "branch point."

<h2>Differences With Other DVCSes</h2>

<h3 id="single">Single DAG</h3>

Fossil keeps all check-ins on a single DAG.  Branches are identified with
tags.  This means that check-ins can be freely moved between branches
simply by altering their tags.

Most other DVCSes maintain a separate DAG for each branch.

<h3 id="unique">Branch Names Need Not Be Unique</h3>

Fossil does not require that branch names be unique, as in some VCSes,
most notably Git. Just as with unnamed branches (which we call forks)
Fossil resolves such ambiguities using the timestamps on the latest
check-in in each branch. If you have two branches named "foo" and you say
<b>fossil update foo</b>, you get the tip of the "foo" branch with the most
recent check-in.

This fact is helpful because it means you can reuse branch names, which
is especially useful with utility branches.  There are several of these
in the SQLite and Fossil repositories: "broken-build," "declined,"
"mistake," etc. As you might guess from these names, such branch names
are used in renaming the tip of one branch to shunt it off away from the
mainline of that branch due to some human error. (See
<b>[/help?cmd=amend | fossil
amend]</b> and the Fossil UI check-in amendment features.) This is a
workaround for Fossil's [./shunning.wiki|normal inability to forget
history]: we usually don't want to actually <i>remove</i> history, but
would like to sometimes set some of it aside under a new label.

Because some VCSes can't cope with duplicate branch names, Fossil
collapses such names down on export using the same time stamp based
arbitration logic, so that only the branch with the newest check-in gets
the branch name in the export.

All of the above is true of tags in general, not just branches.
