Subject: Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

From: Taylor Blau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:21:54 -0600

Just correcting an incorrect 'Cc:' for James Ramsay, which I am fixing
in this email (and for anybody who replies to it).

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 02:57:22PM -0600, Taylor Blau wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Over the past few days or so, there has been significant discussion [1] and
> patches [2] about changing the name of the default branch away from 'master' and
> towards something else.
>
> Concurrently with this, GitHub, GitLab [3], and Bitbucket are working together
> in order to make a similar change across our respective products. Because of
> this, we are met with a bit of a challenge: we would like to make these changes
> before the next version(s) (and so need to settle on a new default branch name),
> but we also want to avoid a situation where the community is fractured (eg.,
> GitHub uses 'main', Git uses 'default', etc).
>
> A related question is whether or not we plan to change the default value of
> 'core.defaultBranchName' at all (once Johannes' patches land, of course). That
> seems to be the intent in [4], but forming consensus around this would be good,
> too.
>
> So, I would like to form some consensus here as to what the new name should be,
> if that is something we're committing to doing. This way, we can make this
> decision now (and allow hosts to make their corresponding changes) while still
> giving us on the list some time to work on the implementation across one or
> more release boundaries.
>
> My interpretation thus far is that 'main' is the planned replacement for
> 'master'. Consensus seems to have formed around this name [5], but if that's
> incorrect--or there are yet-unvoiced opinions that you would like to share--now
> is the time to discuss further.
>
> Thanks,
> Taylor
>
> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAOAHyQwyXC1Z3v7BZAC+Bq6JBaM7FvBenA-1fcqeDV==[email-masked]/
> [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> [3]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/222204
> [4]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> [5]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/

Thanks,
Taylor