Removing non-inclusive language in git

[ethomson]

Git itself is tracking work to reduce the non-inclusive terminology within the project, and changing the default branch name in particular.

Obviously, libgit2 needs to align with changes made in core git for compatibility across the ecosystem.

This issue will track work to get there.

• [x] Respect init.defaultBranch #5581
• [ ] Change default default branch name to match git's

[syslogic]

And how does "political correctness" improve software quality? This appears slightly delusional. The whole concept of "binary gender" is an exclusive concept and should better be fixed instead.

[ethomson]

And how does "political correctness" improve software quality?

It's not political correctness. It's politeness.

Software doesn't live in a vacuum; its quality only has value to its users. A technically perfect piece of software is useless if nobody's using it. So we should respect our users.

This appears slightly delusional.

The libgit2 project follows the behavior of git. You're welcome to suggest that git's changes of behavior are delusional, but you can take that to the git mailing list, not here.

But I think that you'll find that you're a bit late and that people have made most of the novel arguments that call for the continued belief that software can live in isolation and that the words we use don't matter.

The whole concept of "binary gender" is an exclusive concept and should better be fixed instead.

I think that if we try real hard then we can find the time to fix several problems.

[jennybc]

In case anyone else wanders by, I think this issue has effectively been addressed, largely in #5581.

In v1.1, "Fernweh", we have:

The init.defaultBranch setting is now respected and master is no longer the hardcoded as the default branch name.

https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blame/main/docs/changelog.md#L35-L36

[ethomson]

I expect that git will also start using main as the default branch name when init.defaultBranch is not specified. That was the other thing that I had expected to do in libgit2 to snap to their changes.

In fact, I expected that to happen already, so maybe they've lost the motivation to do this work. I'll try to get a temperature reading on what they have in mind, if they are not planning on that, then I'll likely close this issue. If they do intend to do that work in the future, I'll keep this open...