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

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2020, 04:27 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s0-yEQQtwFPyEFN0wxPofVLGv13My=6P5pS+jQaHH+JiQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20201115034649.GC3985404@mit.edu>

On Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 9:47 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 02:19:59PM +0000, Lukasz Niemier wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> > I am pretty much **existing** Git user where I am maintaining few repos
> > yet I am constantly creating new ones for another projects of mine. Such
> > abrupt change in the default branch name, without any warning, would be
> > very confusing for me. Not every user is working on a single Git repo
> > for their whole life.
>
> So we need to make sure existing users know that they can add:
>
> [init]
>     defaultBranch = master
>
> to their ~/.gitconfig if they want the legacy behavior.  This could be
> done by, in addition to mentioning it in the release notes, or by
> adding a comment printed out when "git init" is run and there is not
> init.defaultBranch defined in ~/.gitconfig.

Which is precisely my suggestion: add a warning.

> We do something similar if merge.ff is not in ~/.gitconfig, and people
> run "git merge" without --no-ff or --ff-only specified on the command
> line.   So there is precedence for this sort of thing.

And we did precisely the same thing with push.default.

Show 5 quoted lines

> This *really* is not hard; which is why I am starting to suspect
> people are really kvetching because their objections are really more
> about the woke/anti-woke aspect of the "master" -> "main" migration
> --- and they are using *think* the children^H^H^H^H^H^H^H users as a
> rhetorical device.

Exactly.

There's literally no other reason to change the default branch name (other than woke reasons), and the people against adding such a warning would be doing so purely due to their personal agenda, because they are in a hurry to get the change in, regardless of the implications towards users.

Putting personal agendas aside... we need to add a warning so that users get notified of the impending change, and let the chips fall where they may.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras