Renaming the default branch

[carols10cents]

Current status:

• We are in favor of renaming the default branch across all rust-lang organization repositories.
• We have not decided on what name the new default branch will have; it will likely be whatever Git and/or GitHub go with for their default name.
• Before this renaming happens, we are planning on having an RFC with a detailed plan. That will be the place for any community feedback.
• We want the process to be as seamless as possible for contributors and with regards to any tooling we have that uses branch names. GitHub made an announcement on 2020-07-21 that they are working on tooling to help with this. The most important part of the announcement is:

If you haven’t moved yet, we recommend not moving right now, and waiting until later this year. We’re investing in tools to make the renaming the default branch of an existing repository a seamless experience for both maintainers and contributors.

Because of GitHub's announcement, this is currently blocked and we will check in when GitHub has announced further information.

[github-actions]

This issue is an item on the Core Team's public agenda, and the team will discuss it every week during the triage meeting. The goal of the issue is to provide a public record of our discussion, so only members of the Core Team are allowed to comment here.

Please get in touch with the Core Team by emailing core-team@rust-lang.org if you have something to add!

[Manishearth]

Update: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories-is-now-main/

Existing repositories are not impacted by this change. Later this year, you'll be able to rename the default branch for existing repositories for your user, organization, or enterprise account.

[Manishearth]

Current plan: New repos on rust-lang should main (already done). Tooling is coming in a few months, we should wait for that for old repos.

Action item: Write an email to all@ announcing our action here.

[pietroalbini]

Here is a copy of the mail just sent to Rust Team members:

Hello Rust Team members!

As many of you are already aware, there has been a lot of discussion in the open source community about changing the default branch name used by git. The consensus across the industry has been to change the name from “master” to “main”, and GitHub is working to change the default name on their platform too.

One of the core values of the Rust project is to welcome everyone to contribute, and to make the contributing experience as easy as possible. There are already too many custom things to learn when approaching our project, and we should strive to keep the amount of custom stuff someone needs to know as low as possible.

Starting from October 1st, 2020 GitHub changed the default branch name when creating repositories from the UI [1], and that change was applied to all organizations including ours. The Core Team thought that continuing to follow the default provided by our platform was the best way to avoid increasing the “surprise budget” for new contributors even more.

As a result of that, we’d ask that new repositories created by our teams follow the new convention of using “main” as the default branch name.

Regarding existing repositories we ask you all to hold off making any change. GitHub is working on tooling to make the transition easier, and they plan to ship them by the end of the year [2]. Making the changes without those tools is going to be painful for our contributors and users, and we should wait a couple of months to let GitHub finish with their implementation.

If you have any question please reply to this email, and the Core Team will be happy to reply.

Pietro,
On behalf of the Rust Core Team.

[1] https://github.blog/changelog/2020-08-26-set-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories/
[2] https://github.com/github/renaming/#later-this-year-seamless-move-for-existing-repositories-

[Manishearth]

Paused until we have further updates from GitHub.

[skade]

Feature was added, branch by branch: https://github.com/github/renaming#rename-existing