Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 2:01 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
>
> So, I would like to form some consensus here as to what the new name should be,
> if that is something we're committing to doing. This way, we can make this
> decision now (and allow hosts to make their corresponding changes) while still
> giving us on the list some time to work on the implementation across one or
> more release boundaries.
>
> My interpretation thus far is that 'main' is the planned replacement for
> 'master'. Consensus seems to have formed around this name [5], but if that's
> incorrect--or there are yet-unvoiced opinions that you would like to share--now
> is the time to discuss further.

As I stated in the other thread[1], I'm happy 'default' isn't winning
because I think it can lead to ambiguity about the meaning of the
phrase "default branch" (particularly when someone changes HEAD on the
server to point to anything other than "refs/heads/default").  I don't
think "main branch" poses similar issues, as it's not a phrase I've
seen used that much (in contrast to "default branch").  Also,
"default" being ambiguous bothers me personally more than other terms
being ambiguous, as per my story in the other thread.  However, it's
possible that there is documentation or guides somewhere that have
used "main branch" in the past and could become ambiguous with the
proposed change, and thus would benefit from updates.

In fact, just to verify, I did a quick search of the git codebase and
found 38 uses of "default branch".  There were also 9 uses of "main
branch", but almost all of those were actually referring to a CVS
repository and importing from there which I find innocuous.  There was
one in git-log.txt that looked problematic to me, though -- it should
probably be reworded when we do the master->main renaming.

Hope that helps,
Elijah

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BF8vo_fCbM1ct0MYFhQcVmPwfq7_Q3Fd+SnM0=gVmxkrQ@mail.gmail.com/