Bug 213181

Summary:	We should rename master branch on git repositories
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Caitlin Potter (:caitp) <caitp>
Component:	Evangelism	Assignee:	Jon Davis <jond>
Status:	RESOLVED CONFIGURATION CHANGED
Severity:	Normal	CC:	aakash_jain, bdakin, dino, jbedard, jond, kocsen_chung, lingho, mjs, webkit-bug-importer
Priority:	P2	Keywords:	InRadar
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	213092

Description Caitlin Potter (:caitp) 2020-06-14 08:00:17 PDT

In solidarity with the movement for black lives, many popular git repositories have been replacing their default "master" branch to something not associated with the historical bondage of black people. This could potentially improve things for some contributors, by removing one small abuse for them. It's a small thing, but it's worth doing.

I'm sure there might be some technical difficulties in doing it, I have no idea how this might interact with various scripts or git-svn integration, but I see this as worth doing.

For reference, there are loads of references on social media pointing to mailing list archives and source code which explicitly states that "master" in git refers to the master/slave relationship, such as https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489.

Comment 1 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2020-06-14 08:00:28 PDT

<rdar://problem/64341261>

Comment 2 Maciej Stachowiak 2020-06-14 23:45:43 PDT

git repositories of WebKit are all mirrors of the official Subversion repository. We will need appropriate support in git-svn and other tooling. Nevertheless this seems like a good change to make.

Comment 3 Jonathan Bedard 2021-05-18 13:40:29 PDT

When importing our canonical repository to GitHub, we made this change:
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Over the next few months, we will be deprecating the git.webkit.org checkouts. Since those mirrors are being deprecated, we do not intend to switch the default branch on these to main