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Why force designation of a remote main branch?
GitHub seems to require that one of the branches on it be marked as the "primary" branch. I understand this (perhaps mistakenly) to be the origin/HEAD. Why would they make it compulsory?
On forked repositories, I'm usually making branches and submitting pull requests. There's not really a "main" branch that I want to keep up-to-date. Yet GitHub makes me mark one.
1 answer
These are my theories, but I'm not particularly excited about either of them.
Something to see
They need something to show when you visit the website's index. Otherwise, https://www.github.com/you/your-fork is a really boring page.
On the other hand, maybe it should be a boring page.
Something for comparison
They want to give visitors a meaningful ahead/behind summary.
Conversely, this is exactly the thing I'm annoyed by: If my main doesn't track upstream, GitHub is going to tell people I'm 600 commits behind and ignore the short-lived branches where the real activity happens.
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