github

In June 2020, GitHub announced that is was moving the default branch name from master to the more neutral name, main. GitLab followed suit in a few months later. Tobie Langel makes the salient point on why changing the name is a good thing: So master is not only racist, it’s also a silly name in the first place. The purpose of this post is summarise some of the challenges we faced when moving from master to main, with the goal that if you decide to make the same change, you’ll hopefully avoid some of the issues.

One great thing about using GitHub is the ability to view and contribute to others’ code. Even the code underlying many of our favourite packages is available for us to examine and play around with. Forking a repository is a great way to create an exact replica of someone else’s project in our own user space. We can then freely make changes to this copy without affecting the original project. If you end up especially proud of your changes, you can then submit a Pull Request to offer them up to the owner of the original repository.