References: Remotes and forks

Primary sources

Pro Git by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Chapter 2 section 2.5 (Working with Remotes), Chapter 5 section 5.3 (Maintaining a Project), and Chapter 6 (GitHub) cover the canonical treatment of remotes and the fork-based model. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Read online at git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Working-with-Remotes and git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Maintaining-a-Project.

Pro Git’s Chapter 6 is the canonical reference for the GitHub fork workflow. The L8 fork-workflow walkthrough is influenced by Pro Git but adapted to the modern (2025+) GitHub UI.

Git documentation:

• git remote at git-scm.com/docs/git-remote
• git push at git-scm.com/docs/git-push (includes --force-with-lease documentation)
• git fetch at git-scm.com/docs/git-fetch
• git pull at git-scm.com/docs/git-pull (includes --rebase documentation)

Secondary sources

Atlassian Git Tutorials, “Syncing” section at atlassian.com/git/tutorials/syncing. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia.

Atlassian’s tutorial covers push/fetch/pull with a slightly different framing than Pro Git; useful as a second voice for learners.

GitHub Docs: Forking a repository at docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/fork-a-repo. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The official walkthrough for setting up a fork on GitHub.

Further reading

On git pull --rebase philosophy: the Pro Git chapter on rebase explains why rebase produces cleaner history and when it’s the right choice. L12 will cover rebase in depth.

On force-push safety: the git docs on git push --force-with-lease include detailed semantics for the lease check. Worth reading for anyone who force-pushes frequently.

On the distributed model: Linus Torvalds’ 2007 talk “Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git” is the canonical explanation of why git was designed as distributed. Optional but illuminating.

On open-source contribution etiquette: the Atlassian guide to forking covers the workflow + the norms (sync your fork, rebase your PR, don’t force-push to shared branches). Useful for first-time open-source contributors.

What this lesson does not cite

L8 does not yet cite specific git hosting platforms beyond GitHub. GitLab, Bitbucket, and self-hosted Gitea all support the same workflows with slightly different UIs. Platform-specific docs are authoritative for platform-specific specifics.

L8 also does not cite SSH key setup, GPG-signed commits, or git LFS (large file storage). All are useful in production environments; all are platform-documentation-driven; all are beyond L8’s scope.

License of this lesson

This lesson is part of the Clawdemy curriculum, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 4.0 International. Pro Git’s CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and Clawdemy’s CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license are directly aligned (the 4.0 license is an approved compatible adaptation license for 3.0 source material per the 3.0 license’s later-versions provision). Commercial use is licensed separately at /legal/licensing.