- It tries its best to default to
master. - it always creates a
masterbranch. - it throws a bunch of errors when trying to push to
main. - I always have to do some random fiddling to make it work with the
mainbranch, but at least once I mademasterthe main one instead. - it ruined a few releases of mine, by publishing the older branch.
- apparently this is very abnormal, and no one saw things like this.
- every time I initialize a new repo, I make sure to run a
git cloneto initialize it on my PC, which is calledmain, then it defaults tomasterfor no known reason. - checked the
.gitconfigfile, and nothing unusual.
Check that you’re on a new enough version where main is actually the default, not master.
Also, there’s no reason why you can’t just switch branches? Just create a main branch from whereever (either right at the start after init or at some later point) and push it, then delete master.
Also literally thr first result when googling how to set the default branch name: https://superuser.com/questions/1419613/change-git-init-default-branch-name set it to main manually if it won’t do it automatically
E: regarding the errors when pushing to main, I assume you tried
git push origin mainwhile on the master branch. That doesn’t work because git only wants to push to same-name branches. However, you can dogit push origin master:main, which means “push this branch master to the remoteoriginand rename it tomain”.I don’t know the incantation offhand, but certainly there is a way to tell your git to treat ‘main’ as the default.
However, ‘master’ actually was the historical default; ‘main’ is a newer name (search online if you are interested in why some repos and git hosting providers switched to use ‘main’ … warning, opinions differ on whether said reasons were considered sensible or not).
