Re: The master branch rename, and avoiding another v1.6.0 git-foo fiasco

["Michal Suchánek" <msuchanek@suse.de>]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 09:58:02AM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 12:28:52AM -0600, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 11:14 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > > Is it changing the default branch name when creating a new repository?
> > > (Which affects only people creating new repositories)
> > 
> > You may choose to downplay the experience of certain part of the
> > user-base, because in your experience creating new repositories
> > doesn't happen often, but that doesn't mean these users don't exist.
> 
> OK, fine.  That wasn't clear in your earlier messages.  So this is
> *not* like 2008, where we are breaking workflows or finger macros of
> *existing* git users.
> 
> Instead, we might be causing a certain amount of confusion with
> respect to *new* users, especially if some portion of them are using
> an older version of git, where the default initial branch name is
> "master", or a newer version of git, where the default initial branch
> name is "main".
> 
> It's important we be specific about the concern, as opposed to using
> abstract notions of "backwards compatibility".  Because I'll note that
> even if we were to release a git 3.0, it's not going to fix the
> potential confusion where some students / new users trying to follow a
> tutorial are using git 2.x, and some are using git 3.x.
> 
> We could delay making the change for years, but that isn't going to
> guarantee that all of the various tutorials on the 'net will be
> changed, and experience from long deprecation periods (exhibit 1:
> Pythonx 2.x vs Python 3) is that people will drag there feet and put
> off doing the work to migrate for years and years and years.

But we could, for example, provide a way to specify the default branch
when creating the repository, and rewrite the tutorials to advise users
to specify a branch name, at least the ones provided by git project
itself. Then what the default is does not matter.

Thanks

Michal