On 2020-06-24 at 14:46:27, Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget wrote:
A growing number of open source projects aims to avoid the branch name
master due to its negative connotation. See [1] for an existing discussion
on this. The links [2], [3], and [4] describe community-driven ways for
users to rename their default branches or use template edits to set a new
default branch name.
[1]
https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAOAHyQwyXC1Z3v7BZAC+Bq6JBaM7FvBenA-1fcqeDV==apdWDg@mail.gmail.com/ (local)
[2] https://twitter.com/mislav/status/1270388510684598272
[3]
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx
[4] https://github.com/ethomson/retarget_prs
By necessity, existing repositories require a lot of manual work to move
away from that branch name, but it should be much easier for new
repositories.
This patch series allows overriding the branch name being used for new
repositories' main branch. This can be configured via init.defaultBranch.
The initial patch was started by newcomer Don Goodman-Wilson, as well as the
bigger change that morphed into #655, where we demonstrate how to change
Git's hard-coded default branch name for new repositories to main based on
this here patch series, verifying the approach. Thanks for the contribution!
This series DOES NOT change the default automatically, but only provides an
opt-in mechanism for interested users. The plan for that is to convert the
test scripts incrementally (by introducing GIT_TEST_DEFAULT_MAIN_BRANCH_NAME
, which overrides init.defaultBranch, and then converting the tricky test
scripts first, one by one, using that environment variable).
I'm very happy with this and the way it's progressed since v1. This
seems simpler than earlier designs, and I appreciate the improved focus
on avoiding special-casing branches, since I think that will make it
easier for folks to choose branch naming that suits them.
Thanks for working on this.
--
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204