Re: [PATCH v2 01/12] fast-export: do anonymize the primary branch name

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:25 PM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 11:16:05AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
> > Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> >
> > > Of course that only helps you for _one_ branch. A more generally useful
> > > mechanism would be to teach fast-export to write the ref mapping (and
> > > perhaps file mappings, etc) to a separate file. Then you could convert
> > > any reproduction recipe to use the anonymized names, and share only that
> > > recipe along with the anonymized dump. But that's _way_ outside the
> > > scope of your series. This seems like a good interim step to retain the
> > > status quo.
> >
> > Actually, dropping this special case, and dropping the other special
> > case with fmt-merge-msg, we can do without the notion of the
> > "primary" branch.
>
> That leaves us in the interim with a "fast-export --anonymize" that is a
> little harder to use (you have no way to know which branch was which).

Why does fast-export special case on "master" rather than on HEAD?
Isn't it more relevant to know the active branch than what _might_
have been the initial branch?  It kind of feels like a bug to me that
HEAD isn't the special case construct.

(Speaking as someone whose company a number of years ago had most
their big repos and lots of little repos switch their main branch to
be named "develop", and in some of those repos deleted "master" but
didn't in others.  If I had needed some steps to reproduce a problem,
and hadn't been on the inside, any special casing from fast-export
would make more sense to me to apply to "develop" than to "master".)

> But I don't mind at all implementing the map-dumping feature to help
> move this along. As long as both make it into the same release, then
> fast-export only gets better, and never regresses. :)