go read about “git flow”
there are sort of two workflows for using git
1) what you and I are doing is “fork and merge” * you copy the repo, make changes, offer a patch, and I accept into the repo * you don’t need access rights to my repo to do this
2) at Gaia GPS, it’s similar, but we use “git flow” * we all have write access to the repo, so anyone can make a branch * when we want to make change, we make a branch, then we do a pull request to merge that branch into master * a branch and a fork is largely the same thing, a branch is just a fork where you are writing to the repo directly
fork and merge is how the open source world works
if you ever open an issue on someone’s github project, they might ask you to open a pull request to fix the issue, which would mean forking their repo and making a PR