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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I know this is going to be a PC war, but, I'm curious how they technically intend to do this. Is "main" just going to be a visual alias on the site? If so that will be really confusing if the branch is still technically called "master" and needs to be referred to that way in the command line. If they intend to actually rename the branches I don't know how they can do that without breaking all sorts of scripts and build tools.

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Well git internally is a directed acyclic graph of filesystem changes, and branches are just tags on nodes. Master is just a convention-based name for the default branch when the repo is first created, but it could be called anything. The only way that scripts would break would be if they explicitly listed master, and that should be able to be changed (or git could fall back by reserving both master and main as meaning the "Default" branch and either branch name was interoperable in the command set). That would only break cases where users were also using "main" to mean something else.

They're presumably just changing the default name of the default branch for new repositories created via github.

Branch names have no meaning on git. "master" is just the default name for the initial branch when you create a repository using "git create".

Github just wants to change it to "main". It won't change existing repositories and you can rename it to anything you want afterwards, including "master".

Actually master is used as the default for submodules branch tracking [1]. I maintain a Git client application that deals with submodules & I have to take this use-case into account.

GitHub must work with Git & make this a proper change if they want to do this. Change the submodules specification as well.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules...

You'll have to use the whitewashed^Wcalcium-hydroxided PC version of git.

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