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ForkPress

Experiments

This page is the only docs chapter that covers non-production storage work. Production documentation should describe the forkpress binary and the materialized COW storage model.

Experimental code is compiled into forkpress-dev, not forkpress.

Current experiments

  • BranchFS + SQLite COW: the older .forkpress/site.fp strategy and PHP stream-wrapper research.
  • CAS + Redb manifests: lazy file-store research using Redb manifests and the PHP branchfs extension.
  • Lazy namespace storage: research around NFS/FUSE/FSKit/ProjFS-style branch views.
  • Embedded ZFS smoke tooling: parked under experiment paths and not connected to production branch operations.

Build the dev binary

Terminal window
make dist-dev
make forkpress-dev

Rust-only checks for the dev feature set:

Terminal window
FORKPRESS_RUNTIME_BUNDLE=/dev/null cargo test -p forkpress-cli --features dev-experiments --bin forkpress-dev

The production wrapper rejects dev-experiments; use --bin forkpress-dev whenever that Cargo feature is enabled.

Policy

Experiments can inform future storage work, but they should not appear in product-facing workflow, branching, merging, Git, or storage pages until they are part of the production forkpress binary.