Subject: Re: RES: Can git change?

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 17:58:18 -0800

Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> writes:

> And I have to admit that I am somewhat concerned about your students if
> one of their instructors thinks that their education shouldn't prepare
> them for more than working locally on their computers. Aren't they at all
> interested in preparing the students for life after university? If so,
> they will most certainly be affected by GitHub's decision.

GitHub's decision will most affect projects that haven't started
yet, simply because they won't have to incur any "transition" cost
the existing projects may have to consider.  And given enough time,
old projects die out and there will be more new projects than the
projects we currently have, hopefully.

Until that happens, they would be affected more by decision by the
projects they interact with, as it is most convenient if your local
name matches the name the upstream uses.  And the versions of Git
way before people started talking about 'master' and 'main' have
long been prepared for that, and we've been closing possible gaps in
the recent versions.  "git clone" would notice what name the upstream
uses and uses the same name locally.

Even when they work locally, they'll start getting 'main' from their
Git soon, and that would become consistent with the name that their
"upstream" projects are likely to choose due to this "industry wide"
push.

> Any repository created on GitHub will have that branch name by default.
> Likewise on Azure DevOps. I fully expect the other hosters to follow at
> some stage, and also for `git init` to change the default in a future
> version (I am working toward that goal).
> ...
> Maybe Git itself is not a good example for that. Bigger projects face
> dramatically bigger challenges replacing the default branch name because
> of the short term disruption caused by it. Nevertheless, a growing number
> of projects have already renamed their default branch, such as Snowpack
> (https://github.com/snowpackjs/snowpack) and the react-refresh webpack
> plugin (https://github.com/pmmmwh/react-refresh-webpack-plugin) but also
> bigger ones such as LLVM (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project).

Yes, thanks for giving Patricia and likeminded souls more usable
ammunition than just us ;-)