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

> 
> If we wanted to do this properly, I'd imagine we'd need to add a
> mechanism for repositories to convey "this branch that used to exist
> got renamed to this other name", not specifically for any "special"
> branch name (like 'master').  If we plan to never allow reusing the
> old and banned name, it probably is enough to turn the old name into
> a symbolic ref that points at the new name, e.g. in my repository
> 
>     $ git update-ref refs/heads/seen refs/heads/pu
>     $ git update-ref -d refs/heads/pu
>     $ git symbolic-ref refs/heads/pu refs/heads/seen
> 
> which would create a symbolic reference 'pu' that points at 'seen'
> to say "pu used to exist but it is now seen".
> 
> But that would not work well, as we must allow reusing the old name,
> as the primary point of renaming 'pu' to 'seen' in this project was
> so that we can accept topics from contributors whose anglicized name
> has 'p' and 'u' in capital letters as pu/$topicname branches.  Having
> a symbolic ref 'pu' would defeat that plan.
>