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I saw somebody on Twitter call theirs "canon", which I've really taken a liking to. It fits nicely in regular speech too :D



Is the most recent commit on this main branch called "HEADCANON"?


I use, and prefer "trunk" since I rarely use branches, but "canon" might change my mind.


I've been debating "mast" as it sort of evokes "trunk" in an amusing seafaring sort of way, and partly for the same reason a lot people like "main" because their muscle memory is "ma<TAB>". For several reasons my muscle memory at this point is "mast<TAB>", so "mast" is even a slight improvement over my muscle memory.

But I'm not sure I'd get that much interest from other people to use "mast", it might just be something in my own projects.


I've also been debating just calling it "default" since we always refer to it as the default branch anyway.


Useful to know: the linked GitLab documentation points out several flaws with "default" as the name for a branch, in particular the cognitive association with financial default (a negative circumstance), which would make internationalization hard and while not as terrible an association and history as "master" still a bad association that now I've thought about it I cannot stop thinking about.


I think quaid would be good, you know because of Randy Quaid and also because of Total Recall


Canon is excellent, but I fear it wouldn't catch on due to its religious origins / connotations.


I can appreciate that "canon" is used in religious contexts, but its meaning and origin go back further than that. Wiktionary (hardly the best source, I know) lists three secular meanings before the religious ones begin. The most relevant is this one:

> A group of literary works that are generally accepted as representing a field.

Also, the coinage "fanon" (as in derivative works by a fanbase) comes directly from the treatment of the source material as "canonical". (Frankly, "canonical" is the best argument I can make for "canon".)


> but its meaning and origin go back further than that

master/slave goes back to Mesopotamia, 4 thousands years ago and was used to describe the relationship between men and gods

> Man was believed to have been created to serve the gods, or perhaps wait on them: the god is lord or master (belu) and man is servant or slave (ardu)

I guess being that old is not good enough nowadays


But git doesn't use master/slave (noun). It uses master as an adjective ("master branch"). Think cassettes and vinyl records or "master boot record". It means being the definitive source of truth and has been used in that form for centuries [citation needed, but I don't remember where I read it].

This isn't just an instance of "not old enough", it's an instance of it not even being the same word, so I guess you just can't win this...



what are the religious origins/connotations? That various religions also have a canon and apocrypha?




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