Subject: Re: Avoiding 'master' nomenclature

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:04:55 -0700

Linus Torvalds <[email-masked]> writes:

> It turns out that commit 489947cee5 ("fmt-merge-msg: stop treating
> `master` specially") has the exact opposite effect of what the
> intention must have been.
>
> It may remove "master" from git, but what it does is then make it much
> more visible everywhere else.
>
> In fact, it doesn't even remove "master" from git itself. It just adds
> more of it into the test suite etc.
>
> So that commit is doubly stupid. If the intent was to try to avoid
> "master" as a word, it failed on every single possible level.

The intent was to stop treating 'master' as some kind of 'special'
word, since it is no longer special after init.defaultBranchName was
invented.

It could have been coded to start treating the word that is set to
init.defaultBranchName as a new 'special' word, but the chosen
design is to say there is no special branch name anywhere.  One
reason behind that design is because the concept of "one thing being
special among all others" does not necessarily hold in all projects
anyway.