Subject: Re: [bug#76407] [GCD] Rename the default branch

From: Simon Tournier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:00:22 +0100

Hi Andreas,

I share many of your points and for some others, I need to re-read with
my full attention.  Here a quick comment on one specific point…

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 at 13:21, Andreas Enge <[email-masked]> wrote:

>                         ractically speaking, we could also stick with
> "master" and wait and see whether "main" becomes the majority, and
> decide to switch only if and when that happens.

…when creating a new repository, Codeberg advises:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Creating a new repository on the command line

touch README.md
git init
git checkout -b main
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://codeberg.org/zimoun/test.git
git push -u origin main

Pushing an existing repository from the command line

git remote add origin https://codeberg.org/zimoun/test.git
git push -u origin main
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

And Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket, etc. propose the same.

The initial announcement is from 2020 [1].  Well, already 5 years but I
have not found a list of projects (or examples) that switched.  For
instance, FreeBSD uses main but they’ve probably started to use Git
after 2020. :-)

Well, I’ve just opened the Explore webpage [3] and browsed the first
page of repositories:

        main   IIIIIIIIII
        master IIIII

        forgejo I
        linkita I
        demo    I
        nixos   I
        v3      I

For sure, it’s highly biased. :-)

1: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/
2: https://codeberg.org/FreeBSD
3: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos

Cheers,
simon

PS:
    >                                                    while I may regret
    > that Latin has gone out of fashion
    […]
    >                                                         "κεφάλαιο".

    At the time when Latin was fashionable, people raised the exact same
    argument about cultural dominance… so they proposed another good
    ol’: ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος ! :-) But koine greek was also at some point
    culturally dominant, so people proposed classical עִבְרִית‎. And so on.
    Hum, yet another bootstrap problem. ;-)

    Yeah, a branch named caput because it’s always kaputt. :-D