Re: Avoiding 'master' nomenclature

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 30, 2020, 00:23 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wjN0o-+OAn5wXMcshLGQ4H+CLJwq8+wRnaqzKMuhbmZqw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200730001442.GA2996059@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:14 PM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> I'm on the fence on how magical to make the default. Having "master"
> there gets Linus's case back where he wanted without having to configure
> anything, which is probably reasonable. I'm not sure if people would
> want their init.defaultBranch in addition / instead.

Junio seemed to go for "instead", but I think it might be more natural to just have "master" as the initial entry, and anybody adding entries will add it to the list.

I do think it might be a good idea to make "git init" just add the entry from whatever the default initial branch is.

And then the "empty entry to clear" can be used to _force_ a clean slate, although I don't see why anybody would ever really want that. If you make your default branch name be "develop", and you really want to see the "into develop", you'd remove the entry that "git init" would hypothetically add, you wouldn't necessarily want to do a "clear list".

I assume that "clear list" was maybe done because somebody would put a list of entries into their global .gitconfig file, and then a particular repo would override it by clearing it? It might be better to make it clear that it's just a bad idea to make some global list, and this should normally just be a per-repo setting?

Git hasn't had that "into master" for a long time, and I don't think anybody has ever asked for it, so I don't think that legacy entry is something you'd find people wanting to clear just to see that message.

            Linus