Proposal: renaming 'master' branch to 'main'

[Ján Tomko]

On a Monday in 2023, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>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.
>

Commits should not be an issue, the hash is enough to identify them.
The links to 'blob's including 'master' do not reference any commits
so they would be prone to braking if we move the files around anyway.

>  * 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    which still refer to 'master' which will end up outdated
>

Due to the nature of git, it will stay in the history anyway.
But I think it's better not to mislead people and delete/rename the
branch completely, if a redirect is not possible.

Jano

>
>Ideally, we would rename 'master' to 'main', while the git server
>adds 'symbolic-ref' to effectively create a symlink to 'main'. This
>would mean anyone pulling from 'master' would get content from 'main'.
>AFAICT, this is not supported by gitlab.com though. I had held off
>suggesting the rename, hoping such support might arrive, but I'm
>doubting it will happen on a timescale to be useful, if at all.
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