Hi Jonathan, On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 07:22:39PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Hi Nomen, > > Nomen Nescio wrote: > > > Taylor, how do you propose to build this consensus you're talking about > > on the name change? > > I'm glad you're interested in learning more about the Git development > process! > > There are some open source projects that function (mostly) as a > democracy --- they build the features that those voting request. A > famous example of this would be PHP[1]. There is something admirable > about that approach, but it is not always easy to get right. Many > other projects have their own approaches to governance. > > In Git, we make most decisions by a rough consensus of active > contributors, as judged by the maintainer. There are times that > consensus may go in a direction that is unworkable, and the maintainer > has the ability to make a different decision during those times. If > decision making ever goes off the rails (perhaps you've judged this to > be such a moment!), users of Git have the recourse of forking the > code; such moments have happened in some open source projects in the > past, for the better, such as the EGCS fork of GCC that was widely > used by distributors and eventually became the standard version of > GCC. > > If you are looking to have more influence in the Git project, my > advice would be to become a respected contributor, by providing > patches, well thought out reviews, documentation improvements, advice > to bug reporters, or other contributions. As others learn to trust > your feedback, you will have more influence on consensus. Even > better, you get the immediate benefit of your own work as soon as you > do it. > > I believe Taylor was also interested in another kind of consensus, > between hosting providers, but that would be likely to coincide with > what the Git project does so the difference is a bit academic. What I am broadly interested in is a consensus among the community, so that we don't have a variety of different names for the default branch based on where and how you use Git. Of course, by introducing a configuration option, some variety is to be expected, but I would like to avoid, for example, GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket choosing a different name from what the Git project decides on. > [...] > > slacktivism > > This is a very weird way to describe the people who are spending their > time to maintain Git. > > Thanks and hope that helps, > Jonathan > > [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/821821/ Thanks, Taylor
