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

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:34:43 -0500

On Fri, Feb 21, 2025 at 03:35:20PM +0200, Roman Riabenko via Guix-patches via wrote:
> I would propose the word "release" instead. The word is already widely
> used in guix to refer to published source code of stable versions of
> software, so it should be easily recognisable and describe the purpose
> of the branch accurately. This is the branch where the guix code is
> realeased and where the guix releases are published.

As I think your message highlights, it's not easy to come up with good
names for things like this. And the harder you think about it, the
harder it becomes.

I think that most of the proposed names for this branch (master, main,
trunk, base) are good enough.

'stable' and 'unstable' are too semantically specific to be accurate,
and 'development' is too long :)

But in my opinion, 'release' is not as good, because we already use the
word "release" to mean something that's different from the 'master'
branch.

Although, our "releases" and our 'master' branch are both released upon
the world with the suggestion that they should be used, unlike our other
Git branches, so there is some similarity too.