[tz] changing "master" to "main" in tzdb development repository

Brian Park brian at xparks.net
Wed Mar 17 13:57:44 UTC 2021


The git commands work great, but it leaves a `remotes/origin/HEAD` pointing
to the (now-deleted) 'remotes/origin/master'. This triggers a warning if
you try to do some housecleaning of the dangling `origin/master` using the
`git remote prune origin` command. You need to run 2 more commands if you
want a pristine local repo that's equivalent to doing a fresh 'git clone`:

$ git remote set-head origin -a # automatically determine default, which
will be `origin/main`
$ git remote prune origin # remove `origin/master` from the local repo

Personally, I'm not convinced that GitHub's push for this rename will make
a meaningful difference for the underlying social problem, but this is not
too much work either. Though I had to do it for 5 laptops, and this broke 3
of my continuous integration scripts... but nothing major.

Brian

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 6:41 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> Because the word "master" has negative connotations in English, I
> renamed the "master" branch to "main" in the tzdb development repository
> <https://github.com/eggert/tz>. This follows in the wake of GitHub's
> October change that makes the default branch "main" rather than
> "master", and GitHub's followup changes in January that made renaming
> relatively painless - for example, web requests for "master" are now
> redirected to "main" automatically
> <https://github.com/github/renaming/>. This renaming by GitHub is part
> of a broader change within the Git software ecosystem
> <https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/>.
>
> This change affects neither past nor future releases of tzdb. It affects
> only the small number of direct accesses to the development repository
> for commits between releases. The idea is that on balance the small
> inconvenience for developers is outweighed by the advantage in reducing
> insensitivity overall.
>
> If you are a developer with a local clone of the tzdb repository, please
> adjust to this change by running the following shell commands:
>
> $ git branch -m master main
> $ git fetch origin
> $ git branch -u origin/main main
>
> I've done this for my own local clone of the repository.
>
> To document this change for tzdb newcomers, I installed the attached
> patch to the CONTRIBUTING file just before renaming the branch.
>
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