Understanding the branch renaming

Posted Nov 4, 2025 9:26 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Understanding the branch renaming by zahlman
Parent article: Git considers SHA-256, Rust, LLMs, and more

Isn't it a philosophical question? If a billion people don't care and one person does, is that enough reason? Does the reason they care matter?

In my opinion, "main" is just an objectively better name. It means what it says, whereas "master" is jargon you have to learn. Which makes a small difference to be sure, but the cost is marginal.

That doesn't cover why people change existing repo's though. Though I can imagine external tooling cares. For some new repo's I actually force a master branch because it's easier if all the repo's in a certain group all use the same branch name.

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Understanding the branch renaming

Posted Nov 4, 2025 13:22 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Isn't it a philosophical question? If a billion people don't care and one person does, is that enough reason? Does the reason they care matter?

"All" drinks in the US are kosher due to this. You have the vast majority of the population that couldn't care less and a small, but non-negligible, portion that *really* cares. To avoid the problem, you just make it all acceptable to the discerning group (if the cost is low enough[1]).

> That doesn't cover why people change existing repo's though. Though I can imagine external tooling cares. For some new repo's I actually force a master branch because it's easier if all the repo's in a certain group all use the same branch name.

Yes. We have not changed our historical repos (30+ years; 15+ as Git), but new ones are a mix.

[1] Vegetarian options, while also enabling a similar scale of population to eat at an establishment, is *not* cheap and depends much more on local populations.