bitbucket: fork vs clone?

Question

Using Mercurial with a private repository hosted at bitbucket. I need to add some new features to an application that will potentially end up being serious changes. I've been debating between creating a named branch or cloning the repository. I think cloning makes a little more sense for my case as it's almost a new project that will borrow heavily from the current one.

So my plan was to create a brand new repository on bitbucket and the push my local repository to this new repository.

Now I go on bitbucket and I noticed a fork feature. This seems to clone the repository server side, but also remembers the original repository it was forked from and has tools for showing the difference between them.

What are the pros/cons for this? Should I just use fork or is there any catch?

Answer 1

There are no catches. Forks are just regular clones.

Sometimes I first clone a project from Bitbucket to use and study. And when I have a patch I fork it on bitbucket, push to my new fork and do a pull-request.

So this means you don't have to fork it now. Just clone it locally and decide later that you may want to fork on Bitbucket.