GitLab sets the first pushed branch as the default branch

[Jim Richard]

my repos mirrored from Github end up in Gitlab with a different default branch.
I'm guessing it is related to:
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/setting-default-git-branch-in-bare/

but my git knowledge falls off quite a bit when we started talking about refs and such

any reason not to just "ref: refs/heads/master" on every new repo/project in Github?

[Sam Gleske]

Likely because GitLab automatically configures the default branch to be the first branch that is pushed to it. Perhaps a workaround or patch should be to push the default branch first and then mirror the rest.