Re:Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch
by ret2plt on Monday November 24, 2025 @06:37AM
(#46032975)
Language is in constant flux. If a word has a remote historical connection to master/slave in a precursor project people nowadays don't even know, and people invent a "folk etymology" comparing it to a master record, do you really gain anything worthwhile from insisting on the history?
Re:Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch
by ret2plt on Monday November 24, 2025 @06:42AM
(#46033010)
PS: about the role in git: I don't feel that strongly about it, but I think master is somewhat more descriptive. The master branch contains the most up-to-date version of the source code, so e.g. if I'm working on a feature branch and a colleague pushes a bug fix that affects me into master, I need to merge/rebase to get the latest changes into my feature branch. So, while the master branch doesn't "rule" the feature branches, there is still the implication that changes to master should find there way into the feature branches at some point, which I think main doesn't convey that clearly.
But as I said elsewhere, I do not care about that a lot. However, I do think those words are bad for other reasons because they do not illustrate the _actual_ role and relationships of branches in a VCS in a _good way_. If the master branch is not actually ruling over other branches, then it should be named something else, like "primary" as far as I am concerned.