No fallback to `main` when no master branch exists.

[aversecat]

New user here. When starting work on a project that uses main as the main branch name, there is no help or fallback for this error:

$ git appraise request
fatal: 'refs/heads/master' - not a valid ref

I had to read the code to figure out that -target is the needed option, but, that should really be a fallback mechanism, or, alternatively, the error comment should tell me that if I want this by default, I can do this through a specified (full example as best as possible) git config command to make this the default for this repo.

[ojarjur]

Thanks for highlighting this.

You're right, we need to handle this scenario better.

I think we want to try to intelligently figure out what the default value for --target should be for the given repo.

A simple improvement would be to simply say that if only one or the other of refs/heads/master and refs/heads/main exists, then use that.

However, the repo could have chosen something else entirely or could have both of those refs.

I'd like to avoid having a new config option for this in git-appraise, but none of the existing config options really match.

The git var GIT_DEFAULT_BRANCH output and the init.defaultBranch options are for creating new repositories.

That being said, you can actually set init.defaultBranch at the repository level, and it seems to be both honored and not interfere with the global setting.

This feels like an abuse of a quirk in the git codebase, but maybe using that setting is the best option.