Re: Proposal: Replace all references to master/slave in GNOME modules

[Daniel Playfair Cal <daniel playfair cal gmail com>]

Florian that's a good point about the difficulty of learning git - most tutorials do assume that the default branch is called master.

That said, if you think about this in terms of a smaller step in a wider change outside of GNOME away from "master", it has the potential to somewhat improve the learning curve.

One of the things that confused me when learning git was knowing what the various words meant in simple commands such as "git push origin master". I suspect that if the tutorials read instead "git push github mainline" then the meaning would have been clearer to me ("origin" ... the original? "master"... the main server?). On this subject, "trunk" never reminded me of a tree for some reason (instead I thought of a piece of baggage) so that particular analogy was lost on me for a long time. I find "mainline" to be very obvious.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 7:28 PM Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 9:10 AM Carmen Bianca Bakker
<carmen carmenbianca eu> wrote:
>
> Specifically the Git master branch is a bit of a problem. I personally
> think that "trunk" is a much better term, but I do not have _that_ much
> of a problem with the word "master" in this context to do away with
> convention.

I very much agree with this. It's not the greatest term, but there is also value
in conforming with existing conventions, and "master" isn't quite bad
enough(*) to
justify breaking that.

In particular I'm thinking of documentation. git is a complicated
beast with a steep
learning curve. Changing the name of the default branch means we differ from
almost all(**) existing documentation. The change itself may be small, but it
adds some extra friction to an already frustrating learning process.

I know I'll easily adapt to a new name if the project decides to go
ahead with the
change. But it would certainly have been a problem for younger-me, struggling
to get my head around git and following documentation without fully
understanding
what a particular command does in detail ...

Cheers,
Florian

(*) in this context. I'm all for replacing "master"/"slave" references
where we can.

(**) I'm assuming that gitlab's UI picks up the configured name in its
interface,
   and that the people pushing for this change will update the GNOME wiki
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