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@xxxxxxx> 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
