CODEWITHSUNDEEP
svntrunk
Jesse Johns
Jesse Johns

Reputation: 11

What is the origin of 'trunk'?

I've always been curious where the name "trunk" for the development branch came from. This is common with svn repositories, for example.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 183

Answers (1)

alexis
alexis

Reputation: 50200

The trunk is the thickest part of the tree, from which branches grow out. So it's just part of the tree metaphor: the main line of work.

I can't really say when or where the term "trunk" first came into use. It appears in CVS documentation, so it seems to predate SVN (though I suppose the term could have been added to the CVS documentation later.) Note that other common (and newer) revision control systems use different terms: In mercurial it is called default, in git it is master. These terms seem to de-emphasize the special status of the trunk: As far as distributed revision control systems are concerned, it is just another branch (but it is the default branch for certain operations.)

Upvotes: 1

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