[Mesa-dev] Rename "master" branch to "main"?

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Mon, 2020-08-03 at 12:48 -0500, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 12:42 PM Erik Faye-Lund
> <erik.faye-lund at collabora.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2020-08-03 at 10:30 -0500, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
> > > All,
> > > 
> > > I'm sure by now you've all seen the articles, LKML mails, and
> > > other
> > > chatter around inclusive language in software.  While mesa
> > > doesn't
> > > provide a whole lot of documentation (hah!), we do have a
> > > website, a
> > > code-base, and a git repo and this is something that we, as a
> > > project
> > > should consider.
> > > 
> > > What I'm proposing today is simply re-naming the primary Git
> > > branch
> > > from "master" to "main".  Why "main"?  Because that's what GitHub
> > > has
> > > chosen "main" as their new default branch name and so it sounds
> > > to me
> > > like the most likely new default.
> > > 
> > > As far as impact on the project goes, if and when we rename the
> > > primary branch, the old "master" branch will be locked (no
> > > pushing/merging allowed) and all MRs will have to be re-targeted
> > > against the new branch.  Fortunately, that's very easy to
> > > do.  You
> > > just edit the MR and there's a little drop-down box at the top
> > > for
> > > which branch it targets.  I just tested this with one of mine and
> > > it
> > > seems to work ok.
> > > 
> > > As far as other bits of language in the code-base, I'm happy to
> > > see
> > > those cleaned up as people have opportunity.  I'm not aware of
> > > any
> > > particularly egregious offenders.  However, changing the name of
> > > the
> > > primary branch is something which will cause a brief hiccup in
> > > people's development process and so warrants broader discussion.
> > > 
> > > Thoughts?
> > > 
> > 
> > I'm all for renaming it, but I'm a bit worried about doing it in a
> > way
> > where we don't break all merge-requests...
> > 
> > As far as I know, GitLab doesn't allow changing the target-branch
> > of a
> > merge-request, so all pending merge-requests would all of a sudden
> > point to the wrong branch.
> 
> No and yes.  It doesn't have any way to mass-edit merge requests to
> re-target them.  (It does have a mass-edit tool but it doesn't
> support
> that).  However, it does support re-targetting individual merge
> requests.  I even gave instructions for doing so in my first e-mail.
> :-)
> 

Thanks for pointing that out, I feel kinda stupid now. I was looking
for that feature in the past, and couldn't find it, but surely there it
is!

I guess I should have read more carefully. Updating every merge request
manually should be a totally OK compromise IMO.