I finally got round to changing the name, and decided to go through a major refactoring exercise at the same time.
I had a multi-project set up with a single Git repository and a master repo on Github.
Managing a multi-project set up is simple with the combination of Gradle, Git and IDEA that I use. There's a Gradle plugin for Vaadin, too, to make life really easy.
However, I decided I would separate sub-projects into their own repositories .. mainly to provide logical separation, but also because some of the experimental sub-projects will never be completed.
I wasn't looking forward to the task, thinking it would end up in some complex Git manipulation, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The method described here, works extremely well - and it keeps your Git history. The only issue I had was IDEA occasionally re-creating references to sub-projects that I had deleted - I'm not sure what was going on there, but I eventually cleared them.
The final step was to "promote" one remaining sub-project to become the main project, in the existing repo. This again proved straightforward. Git is quite happy for you move files around, or rename the local repo, as I did, as long as you don't modify the content of the files at the same time.
And finally, Github makes it really easy to change the name of your repo, even re-directing your original URL to the new one.
It makes a change for something you expect to be complicated to turn out to be easy ...
