You know why master is a bad name, besides people finding it offensive?

It doesn’t mean anything.

I’ve worked at a lot of different companies.

Sometimes master is what’s on production.

Sometimes it’s what will be on production.

Sometimes it’s just the dumping ground developers merge into before or after their stories pass QA and it’ll probably be on production someday (maybe).

It’s different per project so why don’t we use a word for git’s default branch that implies it’s use? develop, production, staging, etc.

Almost everything in software is a considerable trade-off. This one isn’t.

There’re already many projects that have a default branch other than master. That muscle-memory of git * master is most likely a bad thing.

We can remove that problem using a short bash function to return us the default branch.

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function defaultbranch() {
  git remote show origin | grep "HEAD branch" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | xargs
}

Now instead of git rebase origin/master we can write some other functions to rebase whatever the default branch is on the current project.

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function gfom() {
  git fetch
  branch="origin/$(defaultbranch)"
  git rebase $branch
}