Re: Jargon and acronyms on this mailing list

On 2024-09-09 Mo 1:19 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 9, 2024 at 1:03 PM Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>> I guess I could try to write code to migrate everything, but it would be
>> somewhat fragile. And what would we do if we ever decided to migrate
>> "master" to another name like "main"? I do at least have code ready for
>> that eventuality, but it would (currently) still keep the visible name
>> of HEAD.
> Personally, I think using HEAD to mean master is really confusing. In
> git, master is a branch name, and HEAD is the tip of some branch, or
> the random commit you've checked out that isn't even a branch. I know
> that's not how it worked in CVS, but CVS was a very long time ago.
>
> If we rename master to main or devel or something, we'll have to
> adjust the way we speak again, but that's not a reason to keep using
> the wrong terminology for the way things are now.


There are some serious obstacles to changing it all over, though. I 
don't want to rewrite all the history, for example.

What we could do relatively simply is change what is seen publicly. e.g. 
we could rewrite the status page to read "Branch: master". We could also 
change URLs we generate to use master instead of HEAD (and change it 
back when processing the URLs. And so on.

Changing things on the client side would be far more complicated and 
difficult.


cheers


andrew


--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com