Branch master is still taken by default when loading a baseline

[jordanmontt]

If you load a baseline like this:

Metacello new
  baseline: 'AllocationProfiler';
  repository: 'github://jordanmontt/object-creation-pharo-experiment';
  load.

You will have an exception saying that brach master does not exist. Which is correct, since some years ago GitHub now uses main as default branch and not master. Iceberg should support both options

[guillep]

Hi @jordanmontt are you sure this is an iceberg issue or a metacello issue?

Iceberg does pretty well at downloading the default branch of a repository when you use its UI.

[tesonep]

This is a problem of Metacello, Metacello is taking the default as master. Changing the metacello-iceberg integration to honor the default branch is a bad option because:

• If Metacello without Iceberg is used the default branch will be master, generating an error if the branch does not exists or loading it if it exists.
• If Metacello with Iceberg is used the default branch will be the default branch of the repository.
• Metacello without iceberg does not have a way of getting the default branch (specially when it is downloading the .tar.gz)
• So, if we load a baseline without branch defined will be different using Iceberg and without it (having really bad experiences)

The only solution I see is to make the commitish name (branch, tag or commitID) not optional, as the default. But this will break all compatibility with existing baselines 😭

Do you have any idea?

[jordanmontt]

Thanks Guille and Pablo for your responses,

For the idea of how to do it, I don't know.

Should I leave this issue open?

[tinchodias]

I agree this is responsibility of Metacello.

However I let this information here: At the low-level, I've found a LibGit function to obtain the default branch of a remote. This is a recent PR to add it in our FFI bindings: https://github.com/pharo-vcs/libgit2-pharo-bindings/pull/71