RSpec Branching Strategy

Jon Rowe

Jun 22, 2020

The short version

RSpec repositories will deprecate the use of master for the default branch name. We will wait for a consensus on the new name for the default branch, in particular what new default is chosen by Github.

If no other consensus is arrived at by 1st of August, master will be renamed main. At that point all development effort will be based off the new branch name, and use of master will illicit a warning on install / usage. All open PRs will be rebased.

The long version

RSpec’s source code is hosted on Github. By default git, and thus Github has historically used master as the name of the default, or main branch. This term has sat uneasily on the minds of the team and with the recent community led moves to eliminate this terminology from our technology stacks, we are going to follow suit and rename this branch.

We currently favour main as the new name (it has shared muscle memory with the old) but we also recognise that having community consensus around a default name is important as it reduces the amount of surprise encountered by developers. So we will wait for the community to settle on a new default name, in particular for Github to change their default, but if none has been announced by 1st August we will use main.

We already have other branches in use for stable versions (e.g. 3-9-maintenance) and they will be unaffected.

Some people will believe this is an inconvience because master is used for lots of things, but the term has its origins in the dominance of one person over another, in particular in slavery and this change is about being inclusive to all people.

Implications

We have always encouraged the use of our main branch for getting pre-release features before we release them as a group of gems, this means there are likely people using the master branch via their Gemfiles. We will deprecate master by means of notice in the documentation, and possibly a post install / on usage message from RSpec itself warning of the fact the branch will become stale and not be updated further. Additionally we will look at using branch protection rules preventing PRs against master from that date.

Steps we intend to take

  1. Push master to main (or other new branch name).
  2. Rebase all open PRs and update our builds.
  3. Set the default to main (etc) for all RSpec repositories.
  4. Push change deprecating master to master.
  5. In the future (possibly when releasing RSpec 4) remove master.