Tskit: Rename 'master' branch to something else?

[jeromekelleher]

See this register article for useful background. I think for the large projects like this one (and msprime) it makes sense to change the default branch name.

I think it makes sense to also change to something more descriptive. How about development? This describes our workflow more accurately, and would have the advantage of emphasising to people that the Git version is the development version, and they should use the tagged releases unless they explicitly want the dev version.

Any thoughts on different names? Any objections to doing this in the first place?

[grahamgower]

dev is a lot less typing than development. Seems fairly unambiguous in the context.

[jeromekelleher]

It'll mostly tab-complete, but it's a fair point.

[benjeffery]

I like main as it doesn't break anyone's m-a-TAB muscle memory, but happy with development as it's descriptive.

[grahamgower]

Wow, I've been using git all this time without tab completion. Is this a distro-specific thing to have git autocomplete as default?

[jeromekelleher]

Well, today is a good day for you then @grahamgower! I think there's a debian package bash-completion which installs a bunch of stuff including git. I don't know how it varies by distro though. Which one do you use?

[jeromekelleher]

Also: main is a good idea. Perhaps we should gather a handful of candidates and make a vote in tskit-dev Slack?

[grahamgower]

Well, today is a good day for you then @grahamgower! I think there's a debian package bash-completion which installs a bunch of stuff including git. I don't know how it varies by distro though. Which one do you use?

Thanks. I'm a long-time Slackware user that recently made the jump to Arch Linux.

[jeromekelleher]

I'm a long-time Slackware user that recently made the jump to Arch Linux.

Old skool. Nice.

[petrelharp]

I like main, but polling tskit/slack is a good idea (will help alert others too). I see github made trunk the default.

[jeromekelleher]

trunk brings back memories of svn and cvs, and doesn't seem terribly descriptive to me (so you keep these commits in your trunk?). main is a solid option.

[molpopgen]

I like main and feel that trunk is too tied to the "branch is directory" idea from svn.

[benjeffery]

The poll clearly chose main. I propose we make the switch on the 28th, to give a little warning.

[jeromekelleher]

I agree - let's set the date for 28th september.

[benjeffery]

All done, closing.