Dan Quixote Codes

Adventures in Teaching, Programming, and Cyber Security.

~/blog$ Moving from master to main in Git

For a while now been using Main rather than Master when it comes to my Git repos.

Its a trivial thing to do, and while its still a bit weird (10+ years of git muscle memory) to use, if it stops one person feeling uncomfortable then its worth it1.

Introduction

There has been lots of discussion around some of the terminology in Computer Science. With some of the words we have used to describe things may or may not be suitable for the modern world.

While (personally) I think some of it is an over-reaction. Just having the word Black in something doesn't automatically make it racist. I am 99% sure that there was never any offence intended when first created.

However, If it might cause offence, and its easy for me to change a small bit of behaviour, why not. Being reasonable, and dealing with others points of view is what makes civilisation work2.

Language is constantly evolving, so kicking up a fuss about you not being able to call something master "Because we always have", when it has no real impact on life, and is trivial to implement seems unreasonable.

The NCSC have a great blog post on a the whole "whitelist", "blacklist" issue.

Commands for changing Repo preferences

Using Main by Default on the Git Command line

A trivial change we can make via the global git configuration

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Modifying existing repo's to use main

If we have older repositories they may use the old master by default. To change this to main by moving the branch. This should retain all the history

$ git branch -m master main

Then push with 

$ git push -u origin main

GitHub and GitHub enterprise

Our last change is to the central repository.

By default full fat GitHub now uses main by default for all new repositories.

However, our Enterprise doesn't yet and defaults to master. We may also want to update older repo's, to use the new naming scheme.

We can do this under

  • Settings
    • Branches
    • Change Default Branch

Git Options

  1. Muscle memory isn't an excuse either. If your old enough to be really attached to master, your probably old enough to have converted through the CVS / Subversion / Git chain, you managed to cope then, so I am sure you can deal with it now. ↩

  2. However, this is not an justification for a general "It offends me, so you cant use it" approach. This seems to come up a counter argument against this sort of stuff (usually by the sort of people who take great delight in moaning about this sort of thing, while calling everyone else snowflake). Yes calling something a main rather than master might offend you, but why? Does it beat, "I feel uncomfortable using words that could be linked to some pretty nasty parts of history". ↩