Rename master branch to main

[stufisher]

https://github.com/github/renaming
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/

[rhfogh]

Why?

[stufisher]

See the second link

[rhfogh]

I did. But all I could find there as motivation is a matter of political signalling, which I had not expected would be a major driver for the Py-ISPyB project. Is there a series of reactions from ISPyB users who are feeling offended? Or do you have some software-related reason for changing the branch names now we are changing the structure?

[rjgildea]

Regardless of your opinions on whether or not this constitutes "political signalling", many major projects have switched to this naming convention (see e.g. Python, numpy or scipy), and any new projects on GitHub will have their default branch set to main. As such, sticking to the legacy master naming will just end up confusing the muscle memory of developers having to regularly switch between new and old naming conventions when working on multiple projects.

[antolinos]

Yes, it is a pain. It is ok for me to rename even if it is only for making our life easier.

[rhfogh]

If we had to discuss whether the inherent merits of 'main' as opposed to 'master' justified the trouble of changing over, it would be hard to avoid getting into politics, where all opinions are equally subjective. Fortunately it looks like we do not need to. If 'main' is now the standard tag name for github, staying consistent with that is a perfectly good, and objective, reason for changing over.