Re: Avoiding 'master' nomenclature

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 29, 2020, 20:23 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wisOOrfEvab9S417MnPSY8dVkbDOKa6ccdi1Bg3X1PMaw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqime69jfc.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 1:05 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

>
> The intent was to stop treating 'master' as some kind of 'special'
> word, since it is no longer special after init.defaultBranchName was
> invented.

I understand it happened.

I just think it's simplistic and wrong, and outright stupid, exactly because it effectively does the exact opposite of what you should do if you feel that "master" is a bad default.

Yes, the old code hid "master" not because of any language worries, but simply because it was the default branch and thus useless noise.

So the patch does something doubly wrong:

 (a) it doesn't hide the (to some) offensive terminology, quite the reverse

 (b) it now adds back the useless noise

and while I understand why that happened, I can't but feel that it was incredibly pointless and badly done.

What *should* have happened is to hide *both* the new defaultBranchName, _and_ if that wasn't set, "master".

Even if you don't want to treat "master" specially, there's two actual reasons to do so:

 (a) the technical one: it's the old default one in a lot of existing
repositories, so if there is no defaultBranchName, it effectively
_was_ that

 (b) the non-technical one: if the aim is to get rid of "master"
terminology, THAT IS EXACTLY what the code did before it was removed.

So really. Both from a technical _and_ a terminology angle, that commit was just wrong.

             Linus