Should we rename the MASTER forest?

[Mark Reinhold]

In the experimental JDK 7 forests on http://hg.openjdk.java.net we've
carried over an old naming convention that we at Sun have used for all
primary JDK TeamWare workspaces for many years.  (The primary workspace
is the one into which all group workspaces integrate, and from which
the product is built by the release-engineering team.)

That convention is to name these primary workspaces MASTER, in all caps,
in order to stress their importance and help prevent accidental putbacks
or, worse, corruption in the case of naive developers who cd directly
into the MASTER tree and try to do work there.  (Yes, this has happened,
more than once.)

These sorts of accidents could happen under TeamWare because workspaces
are shared via NFS and are (essentially) world-writable.  In the new
world of Mercurial, of course, that's not the case.  Our server-side
infrastructure will, moreover, only allow trusted developers to push
changes into repositories/forests.

So there's no longer much reason to use the annoying name MASTER, and
there's at least one reason not to: Issuing the obvious hg command to
get a local clone of the MASTER, i.e.,

    % hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/MASTER

will create a local forest named MASTER -- but of course it isn't the
master, it's just a clone.  Such names can propagate, too [1], leading
to even wider potential confusion.

Given all this I hereby propose that we rename the MASTER forest simply
to "jdk7".  That way an hg fclone will create a local forest with a more
obvious name, and we can all give our shift keys a well-earned rest.

Comments?

(This may seem a trivial issue, but names are important, and once we go
 live with Mercurial it'll be difficult to change this one.)

- Mark


[1] http://www.jfrog.org/hg/openJDK/MASTER -- I'm sure Frederic wasn't
    trying to confuse anybody when he published this forest, he just
    did the obvious thing.