Hi Colin, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 01:24:12PM -0800, Xiyue Deng wrote: >> I would like to echo on this point. I had worked on a repository that >> has the "master" branch marked as the default branch on Salsa, which >> lacks many changes compared to the released version. I tried to >> manually incorporate those changes, and only later found out that the >> actual latest branch is "debian/sid" and it did have everything >> up-to-date. (Note that this has since been fixed[1]). I think for new >> repository, standardizing on a name (either "debian/latest" or people's >> liking) helps identify where the latest work goes to. > > I find myself in this situation from time to time as well. However, I > disagree with your conclusion. At least for me, and I'm going to guess > for most contributors, I wouldn't reliably think to look for a > non-default branch at all unless I was doing something a little more out > of the ordinary such as preparing an update for a stable release; it > wouldn't really matter whether that branch was called debian/master or > debian/main or debian/sid or debian/latest. I usually work on the > assumption that the branch I get by "git clone" from Salsa is the one I > should be working on for the usual case of developing on unstable, and > since that assumption is nearly always correct, it saves me time and > energy over explicitly looking around for different branch names every > time I clone a repository (I work on a lot of different packages). > > In the situation you outlined, it wouldn't have mattered to me one bit > whether the actual latest branch was called debian/sid or debian/latest; > I probably wouldn't have noticed it either way. What would have > mattered to me was that it wasn't the default branch (HEAD on Salsa). > > So, rather than worrying about the _name_ of the default branch, I'd > like to suggest a change to DEP-14 that I think would have broader > consensus and be more useful. > > Currently, there's only one place where DEP-14 talks about the default > branch: the "Native packages" section says "the default branch of the > repository (as pointed by the HEAD reference) should be a development > branch". I suggest that this recommendation should not be just for > native packages. The "For development releases" section should say that > the branch for uploads to the current development release of the > furthest-upstream distribution handled in a given repository (typically > Debian) should be the default branch, as pointed to by the HEAD > reference. > > DEP-14 needn't prescribe exactly what the name of that branch should be, > and if it does then we should pragmatically regard it only as an > indication of what tools that _create_ Debian packaging repositories > should do. Renaming branches is intrusive (it still typically requires > manual action from anyone who has an existing clone and wants to pull > changes!), and so there can be no realistic expectation that existing > repositories will reliably change to follow a new suggested default > name. > Thanks for your comments! I agree with you that with the improvements on tooling (e.g. git), the default branch matters the most for avoiding confusion. However, there is an inconvenience if there is not a recommended default branch name. When I switch among several projects, the default branch name changes between "master", "main", "debian/master", "debian/latest", etc., which is kind of distracting. I think recommending a name helps to reduce this fragmentation in the long run. This may not be an issue for experienced git user, but helps newcomers a lot. > -- > Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org] > -- Regards, Xiyue Deng
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
