[bsimpson]

That's what defaults are for.

You have two choices to make: which branch and which path within that branch. The defaults are "master" and "docs," but allowing maintainers to make different choices there doesn't need to impact the onboarding experience for new developers. The newbies use the defaults - people who need customization can customize. Software development is a broad field and projects work within various constraints and architectures. Asserting a convention here feels a bit misguided.

You already allow the default branch to be customized. It's a bit weird that I can specify a default branch (like "develop") and delete the master branch, but then won't be able to publish docs without recreating master or maintaining a gh-pages branch.

[madgar]

> Asserting a convention here feels a bit misguided.

Expecting GitHub to spend real money to cater to a tiny minority of users of their web service is misguided. The business models behind public internet services are simply not structured to cater to anything but the lowest/simplest common denominator users.

[bsimpson]

I expect a reasonable amount of flexibility in developer tools, especially since the difference between the current solution and the customizable one is most likely two inputs in a web form.

It's great to see new features shipping on GitHub.com (especially since it felt stagnant for so long). I have no idea what their codebase looks like, but prepopulating a text field with the contents of a template.md file and allowing the name of the publishing branch to be specified feel like they should have been fairly minor changes. Especially now that they clearly have the architecture to choose repo-specific publishing locations, allowing those to be user-specified should be a very low-effort way to make the tools useful for more projects.

[kidsil]

> Expecting GitHub to spend real money to cater to a tiny minority of users

You must be new here...