Re: Can git change?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 22, 2021, 18:46 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqpn1w95dj.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAP8UFD0fZBdZ6qwDP9_yW7VAfskTKPC7HVSpK4rD=bORuECpJA@mail.gmail.com>

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 2:05 PM Patricia B. C. <pati.camsky@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello!
>> My name is Patricia and I work as a software engineer in Brazil. I
>> also teach sometimes at Le Wagon, a programming school.
>> I brought the discussion about changing our repositories' branch to
>> main instead of master. The response of one of the owners was that
>> "Git has not changed it, so we will not change". So here I was,
>> wondering if maybe Git would hear me out :)
>> Do you have any thoughts on it?
>
> There have been a lot of discussions about this topic. You can find
> some pointers to them (though maybe not the most recent ones) in the
> article "The history of `master` in Git" in:
>
> https://git.github.io/rev_news/2020/07/29/edition-65/
>
> There has been also an official statement by the Conservancy and the
> Git PLC (Project Leadership Committee):
>
> https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/

I got an impression that Patricia wanted to follow what we do to this project, but AFAIU, both of the above are about what Git does to help end-user projects to rename. They do not talk about what branch this project uses.

A much more relevant direct reference is the brian's assessment for us to switch in Edition 65, plus the test clean-up series from Dscho.

Having said all that, imitating what we do to our project may probably not be a good idea. We have done, and we will do in the future, experimental things, some of which may turn out to be bad ideas [*1*]. The users are probably better off imitating projects with larger developer base.

[Footnote]

*1* subtree merging of gitk and git-gui, for an example, and having
    an octopus merge in the history is another.