Difference between Cotes2020 chirpy repos

For anybody that has created a website using the “chirpy” theme from Cotes2020:
There are two repos which can be cloned to start a new website:

The first repo seems to have more useful information.
The second has “actions” that help clone and later deploy.
Does anyone have experience with this chirpy theme and can further explain why one would use either repo over the other?

Thank you very much

The first one is the repo for the theme itself because it’s open source. it also has documentation and blog posts and any news updates specific to that theme. While it is a fully functional Jekyll install as well, it has a lot of cruft that you do not need to get started. This also contains any related scripts to publish the theme on rubygems: jekyll-theme-chirpy | RubyGems.org | your community gem host

The 2nd one is a repo for a brand new Jekyll project, or for you to start a new Jekyll blog with the chirpy theme… Think of this as a streamlined version of the first repo. Because of the way gems work with ruby, you really only need the chirpy-starter to start your own blog with that theme. You do not need the jekyll-theme-chirpy because it has a bunch of extra pages, such as the documentation for configuring the theme, the author’s own posts with any news related to that theme.

I mean, it would not hurt cloning both repos and comparing the difference. The biggest change is that the number of files in chirpy-starter is significantly less and smaller in size than jekyll-theme-chirpy.

And in the _config.yml file for chirpy-starter, you can see it says theme: jekyll-theme-chirpy

Ultimately, both get loaded in different places in your system/ruby installation. Chirpy starter would be in your dev/docs dir, and the Jekyll-theme-chiropy (well some of the files from it would then get loaded in whatever you have setup ruby to install gem packages.