Re: The master branch rename, and avoiding another v1.6.0 git-foo fiasco

From: Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Nov 13, 2020, 14:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20201113145802.GB3985404@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <CAMP44s3AeESm7VBKbar0ir_Py35g99ZW6bNX_=AK4N=OFkcrdA@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 12:28:52AM -0600, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:14 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Is it changing the default branch name when creating a new repository?
> > (Which affects only people creating new repositories)
> 
> You may choose to downplay the experience of certain part of the
> user-base, because in your experience creating new repositories
> doesn't happen often, but that doesn't mean these users don't exist.

OK, fine. That wasn't clear in your earlier messages. So this is *not* like 2008, where we are breaking workflows or finger macros of *existing* git users.

Instead, we might be causing a certain amount of confusion with respect to *new* users, especially if some portion of them are using an older version of git, where the default initial branch name is "master", or a newer version of git, where the default initial branch name is "main".

It's important we be specific about the concern, as opposed to using abstract notions of "backwards compatibility". Because I'll note that even if we were to release a git 3.0, it's not going to fix the potential confusion where some students / new users trying to follow a tutorial are using git 2.x, and some are using git 3.x.

We could delay making the change for years, but that isn't going to guarantee that all of the various tutorials on the 'net will be changed, and experience from long deprecation periods (exhibit 1: Pythonx 2.x vs Python 3) is that people will drag there feet and put off doing the work to migrate for years and years and years.

So I think it's worth making explicit exact what the nature of the breakage is: specifically, some confusion for new users following tutorials that haven't been updated, and to balance that off against the costs of delaying the change for years and years and years. And that's because individual projects and individual git repositories are making that change *already*. So changing what the default "out of the box" might be in some ways will make it worse for new users who follow the some random git tutorial or traning on the web and then then have to interact with some open source community which has already changed their primary development branch to be "main".

If we know that's the concern, then we can improve the messaging and documentation, and I appreciate that you have done some work along those lines already. So let's see how we can address the problem constructively; maybe that means making the git default trailing edge as opposed to helping to lead the change. Maybe not.

   	      	      	      	  	    - Ted