Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

From: James Ramsay <james@jramsay.com.au>
Date: Jun 16, 2020, 00:50 UTC
Message-ID: <41438A0F-50E4-4E58-A3A7-3DAAECB5576B@jramsay.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20200615205722.GG71506@syl.local>

On 16 Jun 2020, at 6:57, Taylor Blau wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Concurrently with this, GitHub, GitLab [3], and Bitbucket are working 
> together
> in order to make a similar change across our respective products. 
> Because of
> this, we are met with a bit of a challenge: we would like to make 
> these changes
> before the next version(s) (and so need to settle on a new default 
> branch name),
> but we also want to avoid a situation where the community is fractured 
> (eg.,
> GitHub uses 'main', Git uses 'default', etc).

Avoiding inconsistency is definitely front of mind for me.

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> 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.

Based on informal surveys internally, and polling on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/221164, ‘main’ seems to be the preferred option. Using GitLab’s MECEFU (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive, Few Words, Ubiquitous Language) [1] approach to naming I think ‘main’ ticks all the boxes. None of the other proposals seem as clear.

I think Elijah’s points in other messages about the problems of ‘default’ are particularly helpful. I would prefer to avoid that name.

Thanks, James

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#mecefu-terms