7 ms·

On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

33 points by GvS 5y ago

Overtonwindow 5y ago
I know why they are doing this, and I think it’s silly, but I hope that all three people who were offended by the original terms are happy now.
- rurban 5y ago
  Well, I'm offended by "main" now. The major reference is the "main and subordinate clause", which is just sugarcoating the power difference as in master and slave. "Master" references mainly mastery, being good at it. Master is an official craftsman job title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister μήστωρ, Meister, Magister. You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces.
  - bravetraveler 5y ago
    Also appears in audio The final copy of that release, guess what they call it - master
    - 0des 5y ago
      Is everyone supposed to give up their Master's degrees?
      - bravetraveler 5y ago
        Gotta call them 'really good' now
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces And yet you can have a sidepiece...
  - soundnote 5y ago
    > You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces. I guarantee you there is an activist insane enough to do just that.
bavell 5y ago
> Why is this change necessary? In order to be as inclusive as possible, all the default branches for our GitHub Actions repositories are named main. Saving the world, one codebase at a time!
- coreyh14444 5y ago
  This but unironically
bobberkarl 5y ago
Completely useless action.
- bigpeopleareold 5y ago
  Or it is completely relevant for them, as companies with the type of reach they have will make want to me statements like this. People will just deal with it after some initial complaints, but this change will reach a significant amount of projects. This small workflow change will affect everyone who even has casual contact with Github, since there are just so many projects on it.
- soundnote 5y ago
  Not useless: They got to feel good about themselves and saddle people with hours of unnecessary work as the price of their own edification. Power, remember, is the ability to get people to do what you want them to, and it is felt when it is exercised. They exercised power so they could smell the sweet aroma of their own farts.
jker 5y ago
Thank goodness. Every time I merged into the “master” branch, I felt the world was that much closer to bringing back slavery.
- 0des 5y ago
  Surely you jest
- emerged 5y ago
  From now on whenever the topic of slaves comes up, I’m going to refer to the masters as mains.
elmerfud 5y ago
Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon? I'm generally curious because I live in the US and I feel like this is very much culturally limited to the US, but I could be totally wrong. I visited most of the world but as a tourist you don't always see deep cultural problems that may be present. I do know the US education system teaches a very United States centric view of slavery. It's literally as if they don't acknowledge that slavery was a worldwide thing and that even during the times of the primary civil rights struggle in the United States slavery of people was still an actual thing in other parts of the world. So I have real genuine curiosity to know are we alone in the world in this hyper apologetic attitude to the point we cannot use terms like these in engineering context?
- Overtonwindow 5y ago
  It’s a power phenomenon. I highly doubt that the word “master“ caused offense to anyone, ever. Unfortunately there are groups and people that look at any chance to be outraged as an opportunity to exert power. Will it help anything? Absolutely not. However there’s a few people out there that can now say that they forced a company or a project to change its racist ways. In my opinion, it makes the decision makers of those companies look very weak
- chmod775 5y ago
  It wouldn't be an issue in Germany for instance, which is why this "circus" (as some would call it) seems weird to us. However we also have a set of sensitive topics - slavery just isn't one of them. I can easily picture some naming schemes analogous to master/slave that would be considered unfortunate choices here... In that sense it's a US thing, but also isn't.
  - sennight 5y ago
    Ironically the US is far less connected to the unspeakably offensive bla...not-white-listed word being cleansed here. "Slave" is derived from Slav - the people. What did the "master" look like? I hope you like surprise endings, because you wouldn't think this whole farce could get any more ridiculous - and then it does.
teilo 5y ago
The virtue signaling never ends.
captainmuon 5y ago
There is a term for well intended, but useless attempts at inclusiveness: "buttering the cat". I think this is a prime case. Do we have to change "master's thesis" or "golden master" or "scrum master", too? No, because that is a different word! Now what I really did find off-putting is the use of master in "master and slave", as in IDE drives or in I2C. When I first heard it I didn't really bother me personally, but I was confused why somebody would choose such an inappropriate analogy. I would totally be ok with changing that to something more neutral.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Actually I think "scrum master" would be one to start really attacking. It clearly implies that rest of the team are slaves controlled by the master. And that is something probably implemented in some scrum teams...
  - TehShrike 5y ago
    "Master" has other meanings besides "slave owner", there are more plausible ways to interpret "master of scrum" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun
  - knighthack 5y ago
    I don't understand this need of politically-correct people to always ascribe the worst possible meaning to a particular context, especially when it's clear that that worst-meaning could not have been intended.
  - krageon 5y ago
    Or you could assume the "master" means something in the sense of "has mastered the craft of scrum". It doesn't need to say anything about everyone else, it just describes the hat that person is wearing (namely, one of expertise in a given field). The toxic thing here is your insistence on fabricating a demon where there is none.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
happynacho 5y ago
Wokeism is going too far
lnsp 5y ago
Isn't this solved by a large scale find-and-replace for existing scripts? Sure, the changes can be inconvenient but it's not like a major API change or something. They've also been printing out warning messages since December 29th according to the issue, so I'd expect that people would have updated their pipelines by now.
- trinovantes 5y ago
  Except that not every project has/will make the switch to "main" Ultimately you'd just end up with scripts that have to check for both main and master branch
jka 5y ago
Why are people on the issue thread reporting that this has broken their builds when the change hasn't been applied yet?
- jka 5y ago
  Aha: it's because the project team merged this change that intentionally fails the build when people have pinned their workflows to use the deprecated branch name: https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/pull/537 https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/pull/5... (that makes sense; there has been a warning in place for a long time, and pinning to a name can be risky when the content within that reference may change over time)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- TehShrike 5y ago
  It does seem like a weird bug that this would cause errors https://github.com/estuary/flow/runs/5642694619?check_suite_focus=true#step:6:73 https://github.com/estuary/flow/runs/5642694619?check_suite_... seems like it should be some kind of warning instead of an error?
bigpeopleareold 5y ago
So, I am the "main" person, above others. Well, that now broke down :)
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
I prefer "main" as it's 2 chars shorter, and more accurately descriptive. The years-long transition where both namings are in use, will however be worse than either alone. This is always the way: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  >and more accurately descriptive. Not really. "master" clearly meant "master copy" - the copy with everything in it. What does "main" mean? There is no "main". Git is distributed.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > Git is distributed It's distributed into https://github.com https://github.com i.e. not in any real sense at all.
    - bavell 5y ago
      I didn't realize GitHub.com was hardcoded into git and they couldn't be separated. In all seriousness, just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. At it's core git is decentralized which is how GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        > just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it If lakes form, then it means that water falls downhill. No, "GitHub.com" is not hardcoded, it's the largest of the lakes that we happened to end up with. We could have had different lakes, and might somehow in future. But it shows that the gravitational pull of centralisation is in operation. The technical fact that "core git is decentralized" doesn't matter, centralised usage is the usage subset that prevails in practice, due to social forces. "Github is not coded in" is not an argument that "decentralisation could have prevailed". Some form of centralisation apparently was inevitable. This is the one that we got. > GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate. Do they "interoperate"? Isn't it overwhelmingly more usual for a project to pick one of those and stay there. i.e. centralised usage. Yes, they use the same protocol. it's decentralized like http. "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." (1) This indicates that centralising forces are happening here too. 1) https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
kavalg 5y ago
It's about time to rename some of Metallica's songs too :)
- jker 5y ago
  Let's agree on "Pastor of Muppets."
rspeele 5y ago
Ridiculous. The default branch being named "master" had nothing to do with the institution of slavery. It was about state's rights.
disambiguation 5y ago
I don't really care much about the culture wars, but to me its really a sign of the times that stuff like this scores more points than actual innovation.
soundnote 5y ago
>> Our entire product codebase and build pipeline is now broken. > Sorry . We've tried very hard to message this over the past 3 months, emitting warning messages. Please also note that it appears GitHub Actions also appears to be having issues, which is unrelated to our change. If you are seeing general build failures, it might be due to the GitHub issue. Apparently not sorry enough to not shoulder unnecessary work on people for the sole purpose of powertripping and proclaiming their own amazing goodness.
anotherevan 5y ago
grabs popcorn
mransing 5y ago
Heman, and the mains of the universe.

33 points by GvS 5y ago

I know why they are doing this, and I think it’s silly, but I hope that all three people who were offended by the original terms are happy now.

rurban 5y ago
Well, I'm offended by "main" now. The major reference is the "main and subordinate clause", which is just sugarcoating the power difference as in master and slave. "Master" references mainly mastery, being good at it. Master is an official craftsman job title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister μήστωρ, Meister, Magister. You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces.
- bravetraveler 5y ago
  Also appears in audio The final copy of that release, guess what they call it - master
  - 0des 5y ago
    Is everyone supposed to give up their Master's degrees?
    - bravetraveler 5y ago
      Gotta call them 'really good' now
- mcphage 5y ago
  > You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces And yet you can have a sidepiece...
- soundnote 5y ago
  > You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces. I guarantee you there is an activist insane enough to do just that.

bavell 5y ago

> Why is this change necessary? In order to be as inclusive as possible, all the default branches for our GitHub Actions repositories are named main. Saving the world, one codebase at a time!

coreyh14444 5y ago
This but unironically

bobberkarl 5y ago

Completely useless action.

bigpeopleareold 5y ago
Or it is completely relevant for them, as companies with the type of reach they have will make want to me statements like this. People will just deal with it after some initial complaints, but this change will reach a significant amount of projects. This small workflow change will affect everyone who even has casual contact with Github, since there are just so many projects on it.
soundnote 5y ago
Not useless: They got to feel good about themselves and saddle people with hours of unnecessary work as the price of their own edification. Power, remember, is the ability to get people to do what you want them to, and it is felt when it is exercised. They exercised power so they could smell the sweet aroma of their own farts.

jker 5y ago

Thank goodness. Every time I merged into the “master” branch, I felt the world was that much closer to bringing back slavery.

0des 5y ago
Surely you jest
emerged 5y ago
From now on whenever the topic of slaves comes up, I’m going to refer to the masters as mains.

elmerfud 5y ago

Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon? I'm generally curious because I live in the US and I feel like this is very much culturally limited to the US, but I could be totally wrong. I visited most of the world but as a tourist you don't always see deep cultural problems that may be present. I do know the US education system teaches a very United States centric view of slavery. It's literally as if they don't acknowledge that slavery was a worldwide thing and that even during the times of the primary civil rights struggle in the United States slavery of people was still an actual thing in other parts of the world. So I have real genuine curiosity to know are we alone in the world in this hyper apologetic attitude to the point we cannot use terms like these in engineering context?

Overtonwindow 5y ago
It’s a power phenomenon. I highly doubt that the word “master“ caused offense to anyone, ever. Unfortunately there are groups and people that look at any chance to be outraged as an opportunity to exert power. Will it help anything? Absolutely not. However there’s a few people out there that can now say that they forced a company or a project to change its racist ways. In my opinion, it makes the decision makers of those companies look very weak
chmod775 5y ago
It wouldn't be an issue in Germany for instance, which is why this "circus" (as some would call it) seems weird to us. However we also have a set of sensitive topics - slavery just isn't one of them. I can easily picture some naming schemes analogous to master/slave that would be considered unfortunate choices here... In that sense it's a US thing, but also isn't.
- sennight 5y ago
  Ironically the US is far less connected to the unspeakably offensive bla...not-white-listed word being cleansed here. "Slave" is derived from Slav - the people. What did the "master" look like? I hope you like surprise endings, because you wouldn't think this whole farce could get any more ridiculous - and then it does.

teilo 5y ago

The virtue signaling never ends.

captainmuon 5y ago

There is a term for well intended, but useless attempts at inclusiveness: "buttering the cat". I think this is a prime case. Do we have to change "master's thesis" or "golden master" or "scrum master", too? No, because that is a different word! Now what I really did find off-putting is the use of master in "master and slave", as in IDE drives or in I2C. When I first heard it I didn't really bother me personally, but I was confused why somebody would choose such an inappropriate analogy. I would totally be ok with changing that to something more neutral.

Ekaros 5y ago
Actually I think "scrum master" would be one to start really attacking. It clearly implies that rest of the team are slaves controlled by the master. And that is something probably implemented in some scrum teams...
- TehShrike 5y ago
  "Master" has other meanings besides "slave owner", there are more plausible ways to interpret "master of scrum" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun
- knighthack 5y ago
  I don't understand this need of politically-correct people to always ascribe the worst possible meaning to a particular context, especially when it's clear that that worst-meaning could not have been intended.
- krageon 5y ago
  Or you could assume the "master" means something in the sense of "has mastered the craft of scrum". It doesn't need to say anything about everyone else, it just describes the hat that person is wearing (namely, one of expertise in a given field). The toxic thing here is your insistence on fabricating a demon where there is none.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago

happynacho 5y ago

Wokeism is going too far

lnsp 5y ago

Isn't this solved by a large scale find-and-replace for existing scripts? Sure, the changes can be inconvenient but it's not like a major API change or something. They've also been printing out warning messages since December 29th according to the issue, so I'd expect that people would have updated their pipelines by now.

trinovantes 5y ago
Except that not every project has/will make the switch to "main" Ultimately you'd just end up with scripts that have to check for both main and master branch

jka 5y ago

Why are people on the issue thread reporting that this has broken their builds when the change hasn't been applied yet?

jka 5y ago
Aha: it's because the project team merged this change that intentionally fails the build when people have pinned their workflows to use the deprecated branch name: https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/pull/537 https://github.com/google-github-actions/setup-gcloud/pull/5... (that makes sense; there has been a warning in place for a long time, and pinning to a name can be risky when the content within that reference may change over time)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TehShrike 5y ago
It does seem like a weird bug that this would cause errors https://github.com/estuary/flow/runs/5642694619?check_suite_focus=true#step:6:73 https://github.com/estuary/flow/runs/5642694619?check_suite_... seems like it should be some kind of warning instead of an error?

bigpeopleareold 5y ago

So, I am the "main" person, above others. Well, that now broke down :)

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

I prefer "main" as it's 2 chars shorter, and more accurately descriptive. The years-long transition where both namings are in use, will however be worse than either alone. This is always the way: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
>and more accurately descriptive. Not really. "master" clearly meant "master copy" - the copy with everything in it. What does "main" mean? There is no "main". Git is distributed.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Git is distributed It's distributed into https://github.com https://github.com i.e. not in any real sense at all.
  - bavell 5y ago
    I didn't realize GitHub.com was hardcoded into git and they couldn't be separated. In all seriousness, just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. At it's core git is decentralized which is how GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it If lakes form, then it means that water falls downhill. No, "GitHub.com" is not hardcoded, it's the largest of the lakes that we happened to end up with. We could have had different lakes, and might somehow in future. But it shows that the gravitational pull of centralisation is in operation. The technical fact that "core git is decentralized" doesn't matter, centralised usage is the usage subset that prevails in practice, due to social forces. "Github is not coded in" is not an argument that "decentralisation could have prevailed". Some form of centralisation apparently was inevitable. This is the one that we got. > GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate. Do they "interoperate"? Isn't it overwhelmingly more usual for a project to pick one of those and stay there. i.e. centralised usage. Yes, they use the same protocol. it's decentralized like http. "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." (1) This indicates that centralising forces are happening here too. 1) https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

kavalg 5y ago

It's about time to rename some of Metallica's songs too :)

jker 5y ago
Let's agree on "Pastor of Muppets."

rspeele 5y ago

Ridiculous. The default branch being named "master" had nothing to do with the institution of slavery. It was about state's rights.

disambiguation 5y ago

I don't really care much about the culture wars, but to me its really a sign of the times that stuff like this scores more points than actual innovation.

soundnote 5y ago

>> Our entire product codebase and build pipeline is now broken. > Sorry . We've tried very hard to message this over the past 3 months, emitting warning messages. Please also note that it appears GitHub Actions also appears to be having issues, which is unrelated to our change. If you are seeing general build failures, it might be due to the GitHub issue. Apparently not sorry enough to not shoulder unnecessary work on people for the sole purpose of powertripping and proclaiming their own amazing goodness.

anotherevan 5y ago

grabs popcorn

mransing 5y ago

Heman, and the mains of the universe.