ANN: renaming of master branch to "main" for core repository and submodules (dictionaries, help, translations)

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi *,

as requested and announced in previous ESC-minutes and infra-call
minutes, master branch will be renamed for the LibreOffice core
repositories and the submodules used by LibreOffice (dictionaries,
help, translations).

Current plan is to do the switchover on April 1st
If you have objections to this date or the plan laid out below (for
current changes please see also
https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3442 please raise your
concerns ASAP)

What will be done?
* git branch rename from master → main for LibreOffice-repos only
(core, dictionaries, help, translations)
more specifically creation of a new main branch main from master and
setting the default branch for those repositories to the new name)
** pushes (submitting to actual branch) to the master branch will be
prohibited by the ACL (permissions)
** final commit on master branch will be a change to .gitreview to use
the new name as default and to logerrit using main as target branch if
the current local branch is master
** it will be a hard cut, main will continue where master stopped,
master won't receive any more commits
** open changes for master branch will be moved to the new branch
using gerrit's "move change" feature (that keeps the current parent,
so it is not a rebase)
** pushing to refs/for/master (i.e. creating new changesets) will be
allowed for a transition period, but jenkins will immediately ask to
move the change to the new branch (not done automatically, to make
people also change their local branch configuration/upstream settings)
* adjusting of jenkins' gerrit-trigger and tinderboxes to use the new
branch name
* adjusting of the bugzilla-status-notification ("fixed in version x")
bot to use the new branch name


What won't be done at that stage:
* update of all the documentation/wiki pages mentioning master (that's
a community effort, no deadline, if you stumble upon mentions of
master poke #infra or change in wiki yourself :-))
* renaming of auxiliary repositories (like the intermediate repository
used for weblate). Projects will be renamed, but weblate itself will
still use "master" branch in the underlying repo, any change there
will be postponed until 7.2 projects will be created)
* dashboard will not have any custom migration, instead repository
data will be rebuilt/reimported from scratch

ciao
Christian