Re: Renaming the "master" branch without breaking existing clones

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> writes:

> On 03-08-2020 21:44, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> 
>> If we wanted to do this properly, I'd imagine we'd need to add a
>> mechanism for repositories to convey "this branch that used to exist
>> got renamed to this other name", not specifically for any "special"
>> branch name (like 'master').  If we plan to never allow reusing the
>> old and banned name, it probably is enough to turn the old name into
>> a symbolic ref that points at the new name, e.g. in my repository
>> 
>>     $ git update-ref refs/heads/seen refs/heads/pu
>>     $ git update-ref -d refs/heads/pu
>>     $ git symbolic-ref refs/heads/pu refs/heads/seen
>> 
>> which would create a symbolic reference 'pu' that points at 'seen'
>> to say "pu used to exist but it is now seen".
>> 
>> But that would not work well, as we must allow reusing the old name,
>> as the primary point of renaming 'pu' to 'seen' in this project was
>> so that we can accept topics from contributors whose anglicized name
>> has 'p' and 'u' in capital letters as pu/$topicname branches.  Having
>> a symbolic ref 'pu' would defeat that plan.
>
> Of course. Though, having a symbolic ref of 'pu/seen' to 'seen' would
> hopefully not defeat the plan while being a little helpful ;)

How would that be helpful?  After all, I do want to allow us accept
a topic about 'seen' from author 'pu', and that pu/seen branch
should be different from the "not yet ready for 'next' but at least
the maintainer acknowledges that he has seen them" integration
branch whose name is 'seen'.