Switch default PR's base from main to stable

[kdeldycke]

Creating or pushing a new PR targets the main branch as the base. But today all the activity happens on stable. So a contributor trying to fix all merge issues against main might waste some time targeting the wrong base. If we switch to stable as the default PR target, it reduce the feedback loop between contributors and maintainers, and increase the changes of a contribution being accepted.

I do not have access to this repository settings to verify or change that. I still wonder if there is a distinct setting on GitHub than the global "default branch" to specify the PR default target.

[kdeldycke]

OK so looking at the docs and my own repo, GitHub doesn't have a dedicated setting for the default PR base branch. It defaults to the repository's top default branch, the one at Settings > General > Default branch. There is no way to decouple the two. 😕

[davidism]

Yep, it's unfortunate that it's not easier to set up contributors for success here. I thought long and hard before choosing to keep the default as main and writing our contributing guide around that. Either way, some set of users is going to get confused and target the wrong branch. Right now's sort of unusual in that so many bugs came up and we have a backlog, but for most projects it's a pretty balanced work on features (main) vs fixes (stable).