We've had concerns about the default behaviours of tools like git and how
they'll handle the default branch names going forward. There are also concerns
about what providers like github may do, and the potential impact on our tools
like recipetool.

A bug was filed about some of this:

https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14185

I am frustrated not much has moved forward with some of the inclusive language
work and this bug is languishing too.

We do aim to be explicit with our SRC_URI entries so having the branch specified
would seem to be the overall best thing to do here. I have done what was
suggested in the bug and sent out patches to add a warning to the fetcher and
updated the urls in OE-Core to include the branch name.

The harder part of these changes is discussing and explaining them and putting
transition plans in place. I am trying to do that here (and I will also mention
in the next tech call and in the weekly status report).

In the patch I've proposed there is a script, similar to the overrides
conversion one which converts metadata to add the branch name explicitly. It is
far from perfect but should probably help in the majority of cases.

If there aren't objections I'll likely merge the core change. The warning change
will follow in a week or two once at least the layers being tested on the
autobuilder have updated. I'm worried a ton of warnings suddenly showing up
would mask out other real issues.

I suspect we'll see selftest failures as the dict of url parameters may lead to
non-deterministic urls from recipetool but as ever, I'll try and work through
the issues.

Cheers,

Richard