LLVM Has Fleshed Out Its Plan For Replacing "Master" With "Main"

Back during the summer LLVM developers began devising plans for a new default branch name in Git for fostering the development of the open-source compiler stack. Like a growing number of open-source software projects, they have been working to move away from Git's current default of "master" as the main development branch. Beginning next month, that should now be a reality.

While back in June some were calling for "immediate" action in LLVM ceasing use of the "master" Git branch name, the LLVM Foundation and other stakeholders have been spending the past few months not only deciding on the new branch name but how to make the transition as painless as possible.

In an update on renaming the default branch, Mike Edwards of the LLVM Foundation shared their plans to replace the master Git branch with the "main" branch.

In just under one month on 7 December they plan for the master to main transition. Beginning in late November they will be making a "test-main" Git branch for testing their new processes. The test-main branch will verify their setup for automatically copying commits from master to this temporary branch.

On 7 December they will then lock the master branch and make it read-only and switch the GitHub action to mirror commits from the new main branch to the master branch. At that point, LLVM developers are to make their commits to the main branch.

One month later on 7 January they plan to delete the master branch entirely. That gives developers and testers time to update their build systems, test/QA scripts, and other infrastructure that is relying on pulling from "master" to instead use the new "main" branch.