Vladimir Prus
On 29-Oct-15 4:07 AM, Louis Dionne wrote:
Vladimir Prus
writes: [...]
Is this fine with everybody?
No, it isn't. The only way of getting Hana right now is by cloning it from GitHub. By making the default branch `develop`, you automatically make any script that uses `git clone https://github.com/boostorg/hana` clone the `develop` branch, and thus potentially clone something broken. ... In general, I don't think defaulting pull-requests to master is a sufficient argument for changing the default branch. There is a nice CONTRIBUTING file at the root of the project telling people to pull-request against develop, and I am always free to close pull-requests that do not follow this advice. That being said, I don't care much about what is done for other libraries, but I do care about Hana. Hence, please revert the default branch to master for Hana.
I have set default branch for Hana back to master.
Thank you!
That said, I believe that once Hana is included in Boost releases, the decision about default branch should be made depending on what is right for users of Boost. Which, I believe, is to have default branch be 'develop'.
We disagree on that point, and it seems like the decision is not as obvious as it seems. Clearly, changing the default branch has more consequences than simply defaulting pull-requests against `develop`. I, for one, have never been annoyed by the need to explicitly pull-request against `develop`. Hence, I don't think saving one click once or twice per month (how often do you submit PRs?) is worth adopting a surprising behaviour the rest of the time. I say surprising because people are used to `master` being the default branch on GitHub. We should also take into account the fact that the number of users cloning a repository or downloading the tarball from GitHub is probably much larger than the number of pull requests we submit. How many WTFs from users is this going to generate? To me, it just seems like we should stick with the standard behaviour. We can also request a new GitHub feature for setting the default pull-request branch, which, let's not forget, is the original motivation for this whole discussion.
Somebody who contributes to Boost is a whole should not be forced to read files in individual repositories to figure out which branch to send pull requests too.
Sure. Hana also requires pull requests to be made against develop, so there's no need to read the CONTRIBUTING document. Regards, Louis