Fedora Shifting Their Git Repositories To "Main", Some To "Rawhide"

The Fedora Project is the latest open-source software project working to migrate their Git repositories off using the existing default branch name of "master" and instead using "main" but for some repositories will be "rawhide" where it better aligns with the usage in Fedora Rawhide packages to their development development.

Approved at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting was their path forward for getting Fedora off Git "master" branches. The proposal as they ended up voting on was:

Proposal: Approve Change proposal to rename branch names from "master" to "main", except in dist-git-like repositories with branches matching fedora releases, where "rawhide" is preferred. Where the new default branch will be "rawhide", create symbolic refs from "main" to "rawhide".

There were some concerns raised over the symbolic linking of main and rawhide potentially leading to some confusion. There were also some concerns raised apparently with Fedora Rawhide while that has always referred to the development version of Fedora, it may not be inclusive with negative cultural associations for those religions that view cows as sacred.

The proposal passed and now with Fedora 34 the Git branch naming convention will be updated.

Fedora 34 due out next spring is attempting to use PipeWire by default in place of PulseAudio/JACK, should ship with GCC 11 and other bleeding-edge toolchain components, ship with OpenSSL 3.0, use Wayland by default for their KDE Plasma desktop, ship the XWayland standalone package, provide an AArch64 KDE spin, and a wealth of other upgrades.