Renaming `master` to `main`

[jakirkham]

Would like to suggest we rename our branches from master to main. The term master can be problematic and is something even GitHub themselves is moving away from. Suspect beyond doing the work itself, the change has minimal (if any) long term maintenance associated. Would be interested in hearing others thoughts on this 🙂

[TomAugspurger]

Some discussion on this for Python: https://discuss.python.org/t/communitys-take-on-changing-master-branch-to-main/4462

I'm in favor of changing this, but would happily let other projects move first and figure out what breaks :)

[jacobtomlinson]

I support terminology changes like this. Doing a quick search for terms like whitelist and blacklist and highlight a few things we should think about changing.

We recently had to resolve an issue where Bokeh renamed whitelist to allowlist in a non-backward compatible way. I propose we follow suit but perhaps consider making it backward compatible for a while to avoid breaking stuff for other folks.

[jsignell]

I agree that we should make this change.

I don't love the idea of making the whitelist/allowlist change backwards compatible unless we have a very short and clearly defined timeline for getting rid of it entirely. Breaking some things might be considered part of the goal for this work.

[jacobtomlinson]

Breaking some things might be considered part of the goal for this work.

Interesting I hadn't considered that.

[TomAugspurger]

There hasn't been any activity on https://discuss.python.org/t/communitys-take-on-changing-master-branch-to-main/4462. Does anyone know of other projects that have made the switch?

…

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 10:23 AM Jacob Tomlinson ***@***.***> wrote: Breaking some things might be considered part of the goal for this work. Interesting I hadn't considered that. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#68 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKAOIWCJ4XE6WCJOVTY5BLR3MRGDANCNFSM4OF3NMQQ> .

[jacobtomlinson]

Other discussions that I could find:

• Mozilla
• Bokeh
• Scikit-learn
• Airflow
• Elasticsearch

Of those it seems only Mozilla has gone ahead with the change already.

[jsignell]

Definitely not the same as OSS but we made the change at Saturn and it was pretty seamless.

[TomAugspurger]

FYI: https://github.com/github/renaming/.

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.

[bryevdv]

FWIW we did just start this, beginning with some peripheral repos, and so far things have been relatively painless.

[jacobtomlinson]

It was raised in dask/dask#6922 that there are other words such as chain that we may want to consider changing for similar reasons. Diverting that discussion here to be continued.

[jsignell]

I think Github has now implemented all the helper utils for migrating from master to main: https://github.com/github/renaming

I am down to help with any work that this change would entail.

[jrbourbeau]

I'm also +1 for migrating to main and am around to help. Following up on #68 (comment), is there any objection to trying this out on a smaller project first (e.g. dask-examples) as a test before moving onto repos like dask and distributed with more traffic?

FWIW scikit-learn made the switch to main recently https://twitter.com/scikit_learn/status/1352677206972051456