[ClusterLabs Developers] Pacemaker 2.1.0: Should we rename the master branch?

[Ken Gaillot]

On Mon, 2020-10-19 at 07:19 +0200, Fabio M. Di Nitto wrote:
> Hi Ken,
> 
> On 10/2/2020 8:02 PM, Digimer wrote:
> > On 2020-10-02 1:12 p.m., Ken Gaillot wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > I sent a message to the users at clusterlabs.org list about
> > > releasing
> > > Pacemaker 2.1.0 next year.
> > > 
> > > Coincidentally, there is a plan in the git and Github communities
> > > to
> > > change the default git branch from "master" to "main":
> > > 
> > >   https://github.com/github/renaming
> > > 
> > > The rationale for the change is not the specific meaning as used
> > > in
> > > branching, but rather to avoid any possibility of fostering an
> > > exclusionary environment, and to replace generic metaphors with
> > > something more obvious (especially to non-native English
> > > speakers).
> 
> No objections to the change, but please let´s coordinate the change 
> across all HA projects at once, or CI is going to break badly as the 
> concept of master branch is embedded everywhere and not per-project.

Presumably this would be all the projects built by jenkins?

 booth
 corosync
 fence-agents
 fence-virt
 knet
 libqb
 pacemaker
 pcs
 qdevice
 resource-agents
 sbd

Maintainers, do you think that's practical and desirable?

Is there a single name that makes sense for all projects? "next",
"development" or "unstable" captures how pacemaker uses master, not
sure about other projects. "main" is generic enough for all projects,
but so generic it doesn't give an idea of how it's used. Or we could go
for something distinctive like fedora's "rawhide" or suse's
"tumbleweed".

> Since we are admin of all repositories, we can do it in one shot
> without 
> too much pain and suffering in CI. It will require probably a day or
> two 
> of CI downtime to rebuild the world as well.
> 
> Fabio
> 
> > > 
> > > The change would not affect existing repositories/projects.
> > > However I
> > > am wondering if we should take the opportunity of the minor-
> > > version
> > > bump to do the same for Pacemaker. The impact on developers would
> > > be a
> > > one-time process for each checkout/fork:
> > > 
> > >   
> > > https://wiki.clusterlabs.org/wiki/Pacemaker_2.1_Changes#Development_changes
> > > 
> > > In my opinion, this is a minor usage that many existing projects
> > > will
> > > not bother changing, but I do think that since all new projects
> > > will
> > > default to "main", sometime in the future any project still using
> > > "master" will appear outdated to young developers.
> > > 
> > > We could use "main" or something else. Some projects are
> > > switching to
> > > names like "release", "stable", or "next" depending on how
> > > they're
> > > actually using the branch ("next" would be appropriate in
> > > Pacemaker's
> > > case).
> > > 
> > > This will probably go on for years, so I am fine with either
> > > changing
> > > it with 2.1.0 (since it has bigger changes than usual, and we can
> > > get
> > > ahead of the curve) or waiting until the dust settles and future
> > > conventions are clearer.
> > > 
> > > Opinions?
> > 
> > I support this change whole heatedly. I'll leave it to others to
> > decide
> > what new word is best (though 'main' makes sense to me), but the
> > goal of
> > moving away from 'master/slave' is well worthwhile and appreciated.
-- 
Ken Gaillot <kgaillot at redhat.com>