Rename `master` branch to `main`

[schneiderl]

According to our Inclusive Language section on the Contributing Guide, we should always try to use inclusive language.
According to the Guide,

"primary"/"secondary" instead of "master"/"slave"

I believe that if that is in our Contributing Guide, we should follow it in our main repositories at least. That includes how we name our branches.
Our "main" branches are still named "master" in all the repositories from the organization.

Should we think of renaming this?

Also, if we do rename, I would suggest "main" instead of "primary" following what is being done by GitHub.

[sbrl]

Great point. Yeah, I think main is fast becoming the new standard. Is there any word on whether Git itself will be changing its default too, and if so in what version?

@owenvoke, will this result in an impact on any of our GitHub actions or automation?

@agnivade: would this have an impact on the tldr-bot at all?

[schneiderl]

The only thing I could find on Git is that they are really cautious about renamings of the sort.

See: this under Changing the master branch name section.

Either way, this section only shows how one should proceed while changing this. I could not find anything about making "main" standard.

[bl-ue]

@sbrl @schneiderl See the Git project's official statement and code change. I found that at GH's Blog Post -> Repo.

[agnivade]

Don't think so it's going to cause issues with tldr-bot.

[owenvoke]

So, the only required changes for GitHub Actions would be a couple of references to master in the if blocks. We do however reference master in quite a few other places.

I've created a branch to show the differences that would be required: master...owenvoke:feature/main

One thing to note, I think when changing the default branch, we'd have to go through all PRs and make sure that they are pointing at the new one. However, I don't think that should be a problem.

---

On another note, I'm wondering if we should do this for our other repositories? 🤔 The tldr-bot and tldr-lint repos would probably be the easiest. I think the master branch should in theory be automatically redirected, so

[bl-ue]

I think only org owners change the default branch.

@owenvoke / @sbrl / @agnivade will you please change the default branch on the following repos to main?:

• .github
• tldr-bot
• tldr-c-client
• tldr-lint
• tldr-node-client

I'll open draft PRs to rename any branch names to main on those repos now.

[owenvoke]

@bl-ue, are we sure that there are no issues with this? If so, I'll open my PR in this repository.

[sbrl]

I've changed .github as I don't think that one will cause any issues, but it showed a message to notify me that this won't (of course) rename local working copies of repositories, which could be a particular problem for some of our repos.

[owenvoke]

I've renamed the branch in tldr-lint as I don't think this affects anything either.

[sbrl]

I think the tldr-node-client, tldr-c-client, tldr-python-client, and of course the main tldr repo could pose some considerable issues.

For the former 3, developers probably have it checked out with the master branch, so it might be wise to open separate issues there and potentially set a date in the future the change will occur (and also check the GitHub actions).

For the latter, it is of course our main repository, with probably thousands of clones all over the place. We also may have a non-zero number of clients who are hard-coded to checking out the master branch too.

[bl-ue]

So what would we do for the clients? Set a date several months in the future, notify all the clients and request that they update to use main, and then change the repo, and then just deal with the potential load of issues opened by users needing to update their clients?