Renaming the default branch of Rust-lang/rust(blog.rust-lang.org)
blog.rust-lang.org
Renaming the default branch of Rust-lang/rust
https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/10/16/renaming-the-default-branch-of-rust-langrust/
9 comments
It's a performative, bikeshedding protest rather than going out to Broadview risking being hit with pepperballs protesting an unwanted, lawless, occupation force racially profiling and arresting people without a judicial warrant.
It is performative, I agree with that. However, if ICE breaking the law, then why didn't you point that out a few years ago? Why wait until 2025 to complain? The law that they enforce was last amended in 1991 and signed into law by, let me double check… yes, noted Democrat Bill Clinton.
Your complaint is just as performative.
Your complaint is just as performative.
As long as changing the name of the default branch in a Git repo is worthy of the front page of Hacker News: I also changed my defaults this year. My muscle memory has changed so that “main” is now what I expect. I’ll just go with the flow and change the name of a branch whenever I trip over it.
The anti-“master” argument feels pretty weak to me, but just as weak as the vehement opposition feels hidebound. It’s a name of a thing. If it changing it makes more people happy and likely to contribute, why not.
I set my default name to trunk because it makes sense. Main makes no sense.
"Trunk" was the default in multiple VCSes before git arrived.
I do that too, but mainly because I use fossil, and then use the same branch names in the git mirror instead of changing them to "master" or "main".
I think it is generally not worth to change the names of the existing branches, including probably this one, but it might not be a problem. As far as I know, changing branch names in git does not change the hashes (and the name "main" does not consist entirely of hex digits, etc), so it should probably be OK, although still something I personally would probably not have done. (I would have no problems with making the default branch name "main" for a new repository rather than an existing one, although I prefer "trunk")
Suuuuure.
The original master -> main folks should have been laughed out of the room the first time around. At this point it's a religion.