Subject: Re: Consensus on a new default branch name

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:22:39 -0700

Hi Nomen,

Nomen Nescio wrote:

> Taylor, how do you propose to build this consensus you're talking about
> on the name change?

I'm glad you're interested in learning more about the Git development
process!

There are some open source projects that function (mostly) as a
democracy --- they build the features that those voting request.  A
famous example of this would be PHP[1].  There is something admirable
about that approach, but it is not always easy to get right.  Many
other projects have their own approaches to governance.

In Git, we make most decisions by a rough consensus of active
contributors, as judged by the maintainer.  There are times that
consensus may go in a direction that is unworkable, and the maintainer
has the ability to make a different decision during those times.  If
decision making ever goes off the rails (perhaps you've judged this to
be such a moment!), users of Git have the recourse of forking the
code; such moments have happened in some open source projects in the
past, for the better, such as the EGCS fork of GCC that was widely
used by distributors and eventually became the standard version of
GCC.

If you are looking to have more influence in the Git project, my
advice would be to become a respected contributor, by providing
patches, well thought out reviews, documentation improvements, advice
to bug reporters, or other contributions.  As others learn to trust
your feedback, you will have more influence on consensus.  Even
better, you get the immediate benefit of your own work as soon as you
do it.

I believe Taylor was also interested in another kind of consensus,
between hosting providers, but that would be likely to coincide with
what the Git project does so the difference is a bit academic.

[...]
> slacktivism

This is a very weird way to describe the people who are spending their
time to maintain Git.

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/821821/