Forking a repo on GitHub, but use our own semantic versioning tags?

Question

Disclaimer

Our team has used git in projects at work for about two years, but we've never forked other projects, so we're fairly new in the contributing part.

Our situation

We want to fork a repository and use that as a starting point for our own project. First, we want to alter some of the code to fit everything to our own needs, but in case we come up with something useful we also want to contribute back to the original project.

The problem

The problem we are facing is that we want to use semantic versioning for our project and start at v1.0.0 , however the original repository also uses semantic versioning, so there already is a v1.0.0 tag.

Is there any way we can maintain our own semantic versioning next to that from the original repository without losing the ability to contribute to the original project? Or do we have this contribution thing completely wrong and should we be doing things differently?

Answer 1

When you fork a repo, you have to work further on their progress so you can push your adjustments back to them.

If you delete semantic versioning there are going to be collisions when you push your code back to them. Therefore they will never accept your pull requests.

So what you are trying to do is a bad idea. Maybe you should just clone their project instead of forking. The downside is you won't be able to contribute.

Regards