The git commands work great, but it leaves a `remotes/origin/HEAD` pointing to the (now-deleted) 'remotes/origin/master'. This triggers a warning if you try to do some housecleaning of the dangling `origin/master` using the `git remote prune origin` command. You need to run 2 more commands if you want a pristine local repo that's equivalent to doing a fresh 'git clone`:

$ git remote set-head origin -a # automatically determine default, which will be `origin/main`
$ git remote prune origin # remove `origin/master` from the local repo

Personally, I'm not convinced that GitHub's push for this rename will make a meaningful difference for the underlying social problem, but this is not too much work either. Though I had to do it for 5 laptops, and this broke 3 of my continuous integration scripts... but nothing major.

Brian

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 6:41 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Because the word "master" has negative connotations in English, I
renamed the "master" branch to "main" in the tzdb development repository
<https://github.com/eggert/tz>. This follows in the wake of GitHub's
October change that makes the default branch "main" rather than
"master", and GitHub's followup changes in January that made renaming
relatively painless - for example, web requests for "master" are now
redirected to "main" automatically
<https://github.com/github/renaming/>. This renaming by GitHub is part
of a broader change within the Git software ecosystem
<https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/>.

This change affects neither past nor future releases of tzdb. It affects
only the small number of direct accesses to the development repository
for commits between releases. The idea is that on balance the small
inconvenience for developers is outweighed by the advantage in reducing
insensitivity overall.

If you are a developer with a local clone of the tzdb repository, please
adjust to this change by running the following shell commands:

$ git branch -m master main
$ git fetch origin
$ git branch -u origin/main main

I've done this for my own local clone of the repository.

To document this change for tzdb newcomers, I installed the attached
patch to the CONTRIBUTING file just before renaming the branch.