BobBuildTool/bob

git default branch name

rhubert opened this issue · 2 comments

rhubert commented

I just stumbled upon this when I tried to clone a newly created repo with bob. Looks like GitHub, Gitlab,.. changed the default name to main....

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-branch-name/
https://github.com/github/renaming

What options do we have?

  1. leave it master
  2. remove master and use HEAD
  3. policy based change from master to main / HEAD?
  4. config-variable?
  5. try master first, fallback to main?
  6. combination of 2,3,(4) ?
  7. ...?

I somehow prefer option 2. According to the manual (search for builtins.fetchGit) nix uses HEAD as default.

mahaase commented

hmm, the HEAD thing i do not understand.

The special symbol "HEAD" can always be used to refer to the current branch.
https://git-scm.com/docs/user-manual.html

this would change the behavior in some cases. so i guess we should do the policy thing (3).

jkloetzke commented

I kind of incline towards option 4. We could introduce an option in config.yaml or default.yaml that sets the default git branch globally. Of course it needs to stay at master by default to retain backwards compatibility.

The problem with option 2. and 5. is that you don't know in advance what branch you will get. It's also something that may change with time, depending on the server configuration. Some of the earliest versions of Bob did in fact use plain "git clone" if no branch was given. It turned our to be too hard to implement correctly because you will have to handle the case where the default branch on the server is changed and you have to update your working copy accordingly.