Re: Heads up: Geary mainline development branch renamed to `mainline`

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

Hi Daniel,

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 10:46, Daniel Mustieles García via gnome-i18n 
<gnome-i18n gnome org> wrote:
> Great, but having modules with no standard name for 
> master/trunk/whatever branch might break applications like Damned 
> Lies, so this rename should be reconsidered, at least until we decide 
> to rename the whole modulesed's master branch to another one.

The name of the mainline branch in git cannot be assumed to be "master" 
since git allows it to be changed, and as of Git 1.8 the server sends 
and the client looks for the name of the mainline branch when the repo 
is being fetched (e.g. via a clone). Changing the name of the mainline 
branch is easy to do, and in fact our Gitlab instance lets anyone with 
appropriate privs for a project do just that from the project settings 
UI.

So, Damned-Lies' current behaviour is broken because it makes the 
assumption that the mainline branch is always named "master" (after 
trying a few other hard-coded names), and so it breaks in situations 
like this. However, I submitted a workaround that adds "mainline" to 
that list, and that MR[0] has been merged. I'm not sure if it has been 
deployed, but I think it may have been about a week ago.

Of course, this should be fixed properly to just ask the repo what the 
right name is, and if there's interest in fixing it properly I'll 
happily look into it and submit another MR. I've also worked with 
Andrea to fix places in the sysadmin code (git hooks, GitLab 
integration, etc) making the same assumption[1], and that's been 
working fine for weeks.

Anyway, it should be fixed for Geary now, so if you're still having 
problems with this as of this time last week, please let me know so I 
can look into a fix.

> What would happen if every module maintainer decides to rename it's 
> master branch? It will be a mess... I just think we should keep names 
> homogeously, don't mind if it's called master, trunk... ;-)
> >

No, everything will work fine as long as people stop writing code that 
(wrongly) assumes git's mainline branch is necessarily called "master". 
:)

//Mike


[0] - 
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/damned-lies/merge_requests/18>
[1] - 
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/127>

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>