Skip to content

Advise against maintaining a fork in the README. #9607

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Closed
cjcenizal wants to merge 1 commit into from
Closed

Advise against maintaining a fork in the README. #9607

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
23 changes: 19 additions & 4 deletions README.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ browser-based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch.
- [Documentation](#documentation)
- [Version Compatibility with Elasticsearch](#version-compatibility-with-elasticsearch)
- [Questions? Problems? Suggestions?](#questions-problems-suggestions)
- [Forking Kibana](#forking-kibana)

## Getting Started

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -71,7 +72,21 @@ _Note: The version numbers below are only examples, meant to illustrate the rela

## Questions? Problems? Suggestions?

- If you've found a bug or want to request a feature, please create a [GitHub Issue](https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/new).
Please check to make sure someone else hasn't already created an issue for the same topic.
- Need help using Kibana? Ask away on our [Kibana Discuss Forum](https://discuss.elastic.co/c/kibana) and a fellow community member or
Elastic engineer will be glad to help you out.
- If you've found a bug or want to request a feature, please create a [GitHub Issue](https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/new). Please check to make sure someone else hasn't already created an issue for the same topic.
- Need help using Kibana? Ask away on our [Kibana Discuss Forum](https://discuss.elastic.co/c/kibana) and a fellow community member or Elastic engineer will be glad to help you out.

### Forking Kibana

If you really want to see a feature in Kibana, we would love to help you define the requirements,
create a pull request, and review the code and UX. If this interests you, check out our
[CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) guidelines.

But if you're thinking of **maintaining** your own Kibana fork...
you might want to think twice! This maneuver is so risky that we advise against it.

* Keeping your own fork in sync with the main repository will be really tough. We merge code often and can make some pretty deep-reaching changes if we're refactoring. These kinds of changes may be difficult to reconcile with a fork that's diverged far from master.
* Maintaining your own fork also creates a codebase that we won't be familiar with, so if you encounter bugs and need help (like on the [Kibana Discuss Forum](https://discuss.elastic.co/c/kibana)), it's possible we won't be able to help you.
* And last, using your own fork could create potential problems if you're using X-Pack, since there's no way for us to ensure that our plugins will integrate with your fork correctly.

So if you're contemplating maintaining your own fork, try creating a PR into master first.
It could save you some headaches!