How to develop a local fork of a package?

[Alessandro Bertulli]

Hi all!

Pretty much the title.

I want to experiment a bit in modifying org-ref. I have installed it
using the package manager. Then I cloned the repository on my local
machine (in a directory "~/.emacs.d/git_packages/org-ref/"). Then I had
to instruct Emacs to use the local version, and not the
"~/.emacs.d/elpa/" one.

How can I do that? For now, my Google-fu lead to this:

(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "git_packages/org-ref/"))
(delete "/home/alessandro/.emacs.d/elpa/org-ref-20220830.1210" load-path)
(package-initialize)

But then, no matter which one of these I use

(require 'org-ref)
(load "~/.emacs.d/git_packages/org-ref/org-ref")
(use-package org-ref
  :ensure nil
  :load-path "~/.emacs.d/git_packages/org-ref/org-ref.el")

I always get errors.

- What am I doing wrong?
- Or maybe, this process is completely non idiomatic, and there is a
  better way?

Alessandro