Forkortes

Forkortes is a term used in some software development communities to describe a practice around forking repositories and shortening their history to create lightweight, portable forks. It is not part of formal version control terminology and its use varies across projects and organizations. The word appears in niche discussions and blogs rather than official documentation, and there is no single, standardized definition.

The etymology of forkortes is not standardized either; it seems to be a portmanteau combining the idea of forking a repository with a notion of brevity or shortness found in several European languages. In practice, forkortes refers to a strategy for making a fork easier to handle in restricted environments or over limited network connections by trimming extraneous historical commits while retaining essential changes and metadata.

Typical applications include embedded systems, offline development setups, education, and scenarios where repository size or clone time is a concern. The core idea is to preserve enough history to maintain traceability of important changes and licensing, while removing unrelated development history from the original project.

Implementation usually involves forking the repository, applying history-filtering techniques (such as filtering commits, tags, or paths), and configuring remotes to track upstream while keeping a lean local history. Tools for history rewriting or filtered clones may be used, and maintainers often document the scope of the retained history and licensing notes to avoid ambiguity during future merges.

Limitations include potential loss of historical context, challenges for future integrations, and possible licensing or provenance questions. Related concepts include forking, shallow clones, and history rewriting.