Thread (1 message) 1 message, 1 author, 2020-06-12

Re: Re* [PATCH 8/9] fast-export: respect the possibly-overridden default branch name

From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2020-06-12 12:32:51

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:
BTW I heard from a couple sides that "primary" would imply that there is
also a "secondary" branch, and potentially an ordering of all branches,
which is why I did not really consider "primary" as candidate. Besides, it
is so much more awkward to type than "main" (especially when you're as
tired as I am right now...).

That's why I try to stay with "main" for the moment.
You are reading too much into it.  I used "primary" because I needed
a word that clearly conveys the concept of being a special among
others, a word that is about the concept which is different from the
concept of "default", and that is clearly different from any of the
candidates floated as concrete words to replace 'master'.  Because I
wanted to say things like:

    In the context of fast-export, you'd want to special case the
    "primary" branch name, because unlike the "default" branch name
    (which we envision to be 'main' for most people in the new world
    order, so it may be less worth anonymizing because of the same
    reason the current code keeps 'master' as-is), its name can be
    sensitive.

without becoming unnecessarily ambiguous (replace 'primary' with
'main' in the above).

It was not because I do not want us to pick 'main' as the
replacement word for 'master' as the default branch name.

And a set of things, among which there is a concept of "one thing
that is special and different from all the others", does not
necessarily have to be a totally ordered set.  When cloning, we say
that the (often bare) repository at the other end indicates which
branch is the primary branch of the project by pointing at it with
its HEAD (which is the reason why we try to fork it to our local
branch namespace and check it out after cloning).  There is no
"secondary" in such a use case, and there is no need to have one.
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