by m12k | 2026-02-18 10:30:03+00:00
I'll try to respond to your comment in good faith, even though I find it to have a rather aggressive, ad-homimen tone:

> If this pattern is so pervasive, and so many people care enough to attempt to explain it to you, yet you remain unconvinced, I’m not sure how you reach the conclusion that you are right, and correct, and that it’s such a shame that the world does not conform to how you believe that things should be.

The reason nobody has convinced me otherwise isn't that I haven't listened, but because the people I talked to so far didn't actually have arguments to put forth. They seemed to be cargo-culting the model without thinking about why the branching strategy was what it was, and how that affected how they would work, or the effort that would be put into following each part of the model vs the value that this provides. It seemed to me that the main value of the model to them was that it freed them from having to think about these things. Which honestly, I have no problem with, we all need to choose where to put our focus. But also, all the more reason why I think it's worth caring about the quality of the patterns that these guys follow unquestioningly.

> Besides a bit of a puritan argument about “git gods”, you haven’t really justified why this matters at all, let alone why you care so much about it.

Apart from that (apparently failed) attempt at humor, I did in fact attempt to justify later in my comment why it matters: "instead of demoting the master/main branch to that role, when it already has a widely used, different meaning?" To expand on that, using the same names to describe the same things as others do has value - it lowers friction, allows newcomers (e.g. people used to the github branching model) to leverage their existing mental model and vernacular, and doesn't waste energy on re-mapping concepts. So when the use case for the master/main branch is already well-established, coming up with a different name for the branch you do those things on ("develop") and doing something completely different on the branch called master/main (tagging release commits), is just confusing things for no added benefit. On top of that, apart from how these two branches are named/used, I also argue that having a branch for the latter use case is mostly wasted effort. I'm not sure I understand why it needs to be spelled out that avoiding wasted effort (extra work, more complexity, more nodes in the diagram, more mental load, more things that can go wrong) in routine processes is something worth caring about.

> On the other hand, the model that you are so strongly against has a very easy to understand mental model that is analogous to real-world things. What do you think that the flow in git flow is referring to?

"very easy to understand mental model"s are good! I'm suggesting a simplification (getting rid of one branch, that doesn't serve much purpose), or at least using naming that corresponds with how these branches are named elsewhere, to make it even easier to understand.

You say it's a model that I'm "so strongly against". Have you actually read my entire comment? It says "Especially when the rest of it is so sensible - the whole feature-branch, release-branch, hotfix flow is IMO exactly right for versioned software". I'm not strongly against the model as a whole. I think 80% of it is spot on, and 20% of it is confusing/superfluous. I'm lamenting that they didn't get the last 20% right. I care exactly because it's mostly a good model, and that's why the flaws are a pity, since they keep it from being great.

As for "flow", I believe it refers to how code changes are made and propagated, (i.e. new feature work is first committed on feature branches, then merged onto develop, then branched off and stabilized on a release branch, then merged back to develop AND over onto master and tagged when a release happens). Why do you bring this up? My proposal is to simplify this flow to keep only the valuable parts (new feature work is first committed on feature branches, then merged onto master, then branched off and stabilized on a release branch, then tagged and merged back to master when a release happens). Functionally pretty much the same, there's just one less branch to manage, and develop is called master to match its naming elsewhere.

> I’m sorry that you find git flow so disgusting but I think your self-righteousness is completely unjustified.

Again, I don't know where you get this from. I don't find the model disgusting, I find it useful, but flawed. I don't know why you think suggesting these improvements justifies making remarks about my character.