Nowadays it's easy to install a patched package version straight from a git repository by adding a VCS repository to your application's composer.json, but this is still more involved than pulling a regular release from Packagist.

If you run into an issue with a package you are using and you or somebody else creates a bugfix for the problem, you have to wait for the library maintainers to publish a new release to Packagist before you can cleanly upgrade your application.

To get around this issue many developers adopted a pattern of publishing a namespaced fork including a bugfix to Packagist until the fix is merged and released upstream.

Unfortunately the widespread adoption of this practice leads to a large number of orphaned packages that usually have only a single or at most a handful of releases. Additionally these forked packages often retain their upstream GitHub source code url, so on the Laravel Toolbox these forks would receive a high popularity ranking.

Because of this, the Laravel Toolbox tries to identify these projects based on common patterns.

If a project is flagged as a bugfix fork by default it does not show up in search results. However, you can re-enable inclusion of bugfix forks from within the search navigation if you are missing a library.

If you spot a library that is flagged as a bugfix fork wrongly please report this as an issue on the Laravel Toolbox issue tracker.