Re: DEP-14: renaming master to main?
On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 05:50:02PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> there has been a lot of talk recently about how master is a loaded term
> that should be avoided.
> If I read the news correctly, github and others are going to change the
> default master branch to main.
> I don't really have any strong opinion on that matter myself.
For a while I'd thought that it was relatively harmless in comparison to
full-blown uses of master/slave metaphors, but I saw some analysis of
the history recently that pointed out that git got it from BitKeeper
which did in fact use a master/slave metaphor [1].
> That said, what I care about is consistency and predictability across
> the archive.
> If we deem that "main" is a better term, should we change the defaults
> in salsa/gitlab and maybe update DEP-14?
I think my ranked preferences are:
1. devel (for the sorts of reasons smcv@ gave; also, debian/devel is a
nice allusion to this list)
2. trunk (historical familiarity from other VCSes)
3. main or maybe mainline (some tab-completion similarity to master,
though the confusion with components in a Debian context is
unfortunate)
4. further discussion / something else / etc.
5. stick with master
I'm not that fussed about the relative ranking of 1-3, though, and I
agree it would be good to end up with something consistent if we can.
[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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