More inclusive branch names

News
1

We aim to make the DAML community the most inclusive, friendly, and fun place we can, and that can mean breaking with conventions that no longer seem appropriate.

The naming of our default branch master, while very common in the industry, can be seen as offensive to some of our intended audience. Therefore, we have decided to start moving all of our repostories’ default branch names from the historically-charged master to the more accurate main label. Like all things naming-related in the computing world, this is unfortunately not an easy change to implement, so it will take some time to get all of our repositories up to date.

The most tricky repository is the DAML Connect one (digital-asset/daml), which requires a substantial amount of coordination with other systems. For this reason, the change on that repository has been scheduled for December 26th, when we expect little activity.

Other repositories will be updated in a more ad-hoc fashion. Please bear with us through this transition and contact us if it generates any issue on your part.

11 Likes
3

Thanks for the update Gary!

2 Likes
4

The switch has been made and as far as I can tell, everything went according to plan. I’ll keep an eye on things for the next few days, but please reach out if you notice anything not working or if this seems to be causing any issue for you.

If you have a local checkout of the daml repo, you can update it to work with main instead of master by running the following commands:

    git checkout master
    git branch -m master main
    git fetch
    git branch --unset-upstream
    git branch -u origin/main
    git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/main

As a somewhat related note, if you want to configure your machine to use main instead of master as the default branch for new repos you create (git init), you can run:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main
3 Likes