Re: Renaming the "master" branch without breaking existing clones

From: Matt McCutchen <matt@mattmccutchen.net>
Date: Aug 4, 2020, 00:37 UTC
Message-ID: <baea11c61973ff4be5ad33499d80f8629e2e1261.camel@mattmccutchen.net>
In-Reply-To: <20200803194006.GA2715275@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, 2020-08-03 at 15:40 -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> The real trick is that you can't create or update symbolic refs on the
> server side using a client. So this would have to be something that
> hosting providers allow (and there might be some security implications;
> I'm not sure what happens if you create a loop in the symref
> resolution).

Right, repository administrators need some kind of support for the hosting provider (whether symrefs or something custom), otherwise the best they can do is develop their own process to mirror the new branch to the old branch.

GitHub mentions a plan to support a branch rename that would redirect at least fetches of the old name, though it is short on details:

https://github.com/github/renaming#later-this-year-seamless-move-for-existing-repositories-

I've just filed feature requests for BitBucket and GitLab:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-20349 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/233427#related-issues

Anyone want to check on other major providers?

Matt