Rename master branch to main

[simonw]

I was waiting for consensus to form around this (and kind-of hoping for trunk since I like the tree metaphor) and it looks like main is it.

I've seen convincing arguments against trunk too - it indicates that the branch has some special significance like in Subversion (where all branches come from trunk) when it doesn't. So main is better anyway.

[simonw]

I'll make this change on a few of my other repos first to make sure I haven't missed any tricky edge-cases.

[simonw]

I'm doing https://github.com/simonw/datasette-psutil first.

In my local checkout:

git branch -m master main
git push -u origin main

(Thanks, https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx)

Then in https://github.com/simonw/datasette-psutil/settings/branches I changed the default branch to main.

Links to these docs: https://help.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/setting-the-default-branch

That worked! https://github.com/simonw/datasette-psutil

One catch, which I think will impact my most widely used repos the most (like datasette) - linking to a specific file now looks like this:

https://github.com/simonw/datasette-psutil/blob/main/datasette_psutil/__init__.py

The old https://github.com/simonw/datasette-psutil/blob/master/datasette_psutil/__init__.py link is presumably frozen in time?

I've definitely got links spread around the web to my "most recent version of this code" that would use the master reference, which would need to be updated to main instead. Most of those are probably in the Datasette docs and on my blog though.

[simonw]

The big question is how this impacts existing CI configuration. datasette-psutil is configured to use Circle CI, what happens if I push a new commit?

[simonw]

This guide is fantastic - I'll be following it closely: https://github.com/chancancode/branch-rename/blob/main/README.md - in particular the Action to mirror master and main for a while.

[simonw]

https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1273983493006077952 concerns what happens to open pull requests - they will automatically close when you remove master unless you repoint them to main first.

[simonw]

I mentioned this issue here: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Jun/26/weeknotes-plugins-sqlite-generate/

Repositories created by following the README in https://github.com/simonw/datasette-template and https://github.com/simonw/click-app have a main branch instead of master so I have a few examples live now. https://github.com/simonw/datasette-saved-queries is one example.

[simonw]

Watch out for places in the documentation that might link to master - e.g. here:

datasette/docs/custom_templates.rst

Line 247 in 2d7fa8b

HTML template and `can be seen here <https://github.com/simonw/datasette/blob/master/datasette/templates/_table.html>`_.

[simonw]

https://github.com/simonw/datasette/tree/main branch now exists and will automatically mirror master (and vice-versa).

[simonw]

I'm going to change the default branch on the GitHub repository. If something breaks I can always change it back again.

Done that! Default is now main.