


A local repo with multiple remotes can get confusing if only one of the remotes renames a branch.Open pull requests may reference non existent branches.Note that there are some risks when you rename branches like this. They also provide some additional information if you want to do something similar. The following notes explain how we are doing this.

Repos on other systems will follow as well, but will take longer because of some of the issues listed below. GitHub will be automating this process later this year, but we didn’t want to wait. On our GitHub repos (public and private) we are changing master branch to main over the next few weeks. As part of the process PaperCut is examining our use of technical terms and labels as a small part of that change, so renaming the master branch in as many of our repos as possible seems like an obvious thing to do. These goals need to be addressed with real change. PaperCut needs to: authentically live our anti-racist values meet expecations in the broader community and, most importantly, respect our diverse colleagues and partners. I suspect if we were making the decision today, we’d pick another name, since that’s not what we want people to think of when they use Git” …“master”, even though from a different origin, brings the idea of human bondage and suffering to mind for a non-trivial number of people, which of course was not the intention and is undesirable. Carlson on the Git mailing list sums it up very nicely: You will find it useful to review GitHub’s corresponding release blog post and some of the linked documents. To that end rel 2.28 of Git now provides support to reconfigure the default. As part of this, the Git community has been doing some soul searching about using master as the default branch name in the git init command. Inline with the global Black Lives Matter movement, various developer communities have been looking at behaviours and language to see how we can all be more inclusive. Note that this blog post assumes you have already experience with Git, the world’s most popular version control tool. This post explains why, shows how we are approaching this, and gives some suggestions that might be useful if you want to make similar changes. TL DR: We are renaming our Git master branches to main.
