Skip to content

Update default branch in active toolbox projects

Problem Statement

What is the problem?

A lot of projects in gitlab-com/support/toolbox still use master as their default branch name. During a recent sync @bcarranza and I noticed this when we spoke about me taking on maintainership for the gitlabrb_sanitizer – where it also was the case.

Why is this a problem?

It's one of our top misused terms and we publicly explained why we're moving away from it two years ago. It is counter to our DIB value, mostly the operating principle of Inclusive language.

Proposal

We should strive to be a guiding example and change to main for all active toolbox projects. As you see in the table below, quite a few of them probably can just be archived – I've included the last commit date and sorted the table by it. I've also included the most recent commit and MR author information, because we don't really have a list of individual maintainers (or I don't know about it).

If you're maintaining a project in that list: Please go ahead, action on this and then remove the project from the list. After the due date of this issue has passed, I will begin actioning on all remaining projects myself. For active projects I will reach out to individual people where it makes sense, or perform the change myself. For abandonded projects I will archive them – a very two-way door thing to do.

List of projects (Last update: 2023-07-31)

Project Last Commit Date Last Commit User Last MR User
1-1 Issue Generator 2023-07-20 Jason Colyer Jason Colyer
Customers Console and Functions 2023-07-19 Etienne Baqué Etienne Baqué
fast-stats 2023-07-05 Katrin Leinweber Katrin Leinweber
DEWR 2023-06-28 Jason Colyer Jason Colyer
ADWR 2023-06-28 Jason Colyer Nabeel Bilgrami
Mechanizer 2023-05-25 Duncan Duncan
forms_processor 2023-04-02 Ronnie Alfaro Ronnie Alfaro
strace-parser 2023-03-03 Will Chandler Will Chandler
mechanizer-reports 2022-11-01 Cynthia "Arty" Ng Cynthia "Arty" Ng
Support Calendar 2022-09-02 Ket Slaats Ket Slaats

DRI

@manuelgrabowski will act as the DRI for this issue.

Required Resources

  • The maintainers of the projects
    • A proper list of who maintains which project would be very useful.

Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider

I chose the gitlab-com/support/toolbox namespace because it's mostly internal, uncritical projects. The main thing to consider is probably the gitlabsos project where we link to specific ref URLs in tickets, and some customers might have URLs hardcoded. I'll open a specific proposal on how to safely migrate as an issue in that project shortly. (Edit: Change default branch name (gitlab-com/support/toolbox/gitlabsos#73 - closed))

Desired Outcome

No more active projects with a master default branch in the gitlab-com/support/toolbox namespace.

What does success look like?

Inactive projects get archived, active projects have the default branch name changed to main.

How do we measure success?

We re-run the script that generated the list above and get no output.

Where would future feedback go?

This issue.

Related Issues/MRs/Epics/Tickets

Edited by Manuel Grabowski