A repository with no check-ins has an unborn trunk, so the timeline, the file tree and every clone instruction have nothing to point at. Optional README, license (MIT or BSD-2) and .zitignore give it a born trunk, which is why GitHub offers the same three at creation.

The copyright line is left as <copyright holder> rather than filled with the account name: a copyright naming the wrong person is worse than one that is visibly unfinished, and an account is a login, not a legal entity. Seeding is refused on a clone, which arrives with its own history, and paths are checked against the repository root before anything is written. check-in: c5b6d979e2 user: dmestas tags: trunk