Re: Proposal: renaming 'master' branch to 'main'

On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 02:55:10PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > I don't recall exactly when it first came up, but it has been a few years > now since the idea of moving away from 'master' as the git default branch > name became a topic in OSS communities. Far from the first mention: > > https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/ > > Both gitlab.com and github.com now default to 'main' as the default > branch when creating new repositories: > > https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-branch-name/ > https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-cre... > > Some notable large open source projects have done, (or at least started) > to rename the default branch in their existing projects too. eg > > GNOME: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/2348 > Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GitRepos-master-to-main > > For libosinfo we did a rename last year. There was a little disruption > but nothing too terrible, IIRC, missing weblate translation branch > update was our main mistake. > > I'd suggest it is time to libvirt to get on this train and rename our > default branch to 'main' in all repositories. > > There are essentially two options > > * Rename 'master' to 'main' > > With this, anyone pulling from an existing checkout will get an > error telling them that 'master' does not exist. It won't tell > them about 'main', but at least it gives them a sign that something > in their checkout probably needs changing. > > Downside is that any URLs pointing to source files / commits with > a branch name in the URL will become 404s. > > * Clone 'master' to 'main' > > With this, anyone pulling from an existing checkout will get no > updates. It is very easy for people to not realize that they are > tracking a branch which is no longer used > > Downside is also that the undesirable term 'master' remains > present in the repo, even if unused. We might also miss places > which still refer to 'master' which will end up outdated We can also then remove everything from master and just keep a README file explaining the situation.