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I don't really get why 'main' seems to be the goto replacement word. Surely 'trunk' is best, since it complements 'branch' analogy. Fossil calls it trunk and
by catalogia 6y ago
I don't really get why 'main' seems to be the goto replacement word. Surely 'trunk' is best, since it complements 'branch' analogy. Fossil calls it trunk and IIRC subversion does too, probably a few others as well.
Is it because main and master both begin with the same letter?
- asveikau 6y agoThat's for the branch name. A bunch of the places in the diff are for other uses of the word master. Like if you have any pair of items and one of them is primary.
- glofish 6y agotrunk would not be a good term since it is not a trunk, it is a branch. Some of the problems with the proposed alternatives (and this applies for the other terms as well: "blocklist", "parent") is that the words are overly specific and have a meaning that could be clearly misleading, like calling one of the branches "trunk". One of the reasons that white/black terms stuck is that they are not overly specific hence can be applied for diverse situations yet maintain the clarity of they mean. Perhaps it should be called "first" or if you feel fancy "origo" - as in the first branch created when you initialize a repository.
- catalogia 6y agoFirst/origo makes more sense to me than 'main' following that logic. I've seen plenty of projects where the 'main'/'mainline'/'master' isn't actually where any development is done or any code deployed from. Other branches originate from them, but the focus of the developers is in other parts of the tree. That's also why I think 'trunk' is a good name. It describes the positional relationship that part of the tree has to other parts, without ascribing any organizational importance to it. I don't think 'first' is ideal though, since that has a temporal component and would be better applied to the root commit.