On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”
github.comThere 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.
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...
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.
Well by the sounds of many, scrum master definitely doesn't imply a master of scrum
I'm saying this is likely what the title was conceptualised to mean. In practice it doesn't mean that at all, but that's not germane in this particular context I think :)
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.
"Master" has other meanings besides "slave owner", there are more plausible ways to interpret "master of scrum" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun
I can’t speak for the cat, but this kind of change is really annoying. Then again I am not in the US and have no cultural biases that allow me to relate to the motivation behind this kind of thing.
But hypersensitivity to these matters seems to have taken the tech world by storm, and we live in a largely US-led ASCII/UTF-8 where strings of characters are sometimes imbued with magical meanings, so…
Even with master-slave, why is that offensive? It’s a concept. Is referring to poor quality work insulting to poor people? Sure, the concept was applied to people and it was horrible. But does not speaking the words/concepts help? Should we never speak of the holocaust for the same reason? I’ve never understood the logic of how a concept is personally insulting or painful. It’s just a concept.
Thank goodness. Every time I merged into the “master” branch, I felt the world was that much closer to bringing back slavery.
From now on whenever the topic of slaves comes up, I’m going to refer to the masters as mains.
Surely you jest
> 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!
This but unironically
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?
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.
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.
Something tells me you wouldn’t call someone who insists on proper language a “grammar Nazi” in Germany.
Small data point: I personally haven't heard anything about that in France. At work we use a self-hosted Github. Some repos have "default" as the primary branch, some have "main", some have "master". You can see some repos that are partially or fully financed by the French government here: https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos. When listing by stars, I see that most in the top 20 are using "master", which seems to be the default when they were created. I know that OCaml uses "trunk".
There are also some hits when searching for "esclave" (French for slave) and lots of when searching for "slave" in our internal doc. That's not representative of all of France, just a small data point of myself and a few things around me.
From my perspective, this seems like a "United States phenomenon" way more than a "western phenomenon". I've spent some time in school studying what we call the triangular trade in school (middle and high school), and I remember some English courses where we talked about slavery and civil rights in the US. But slavery itself is rarely a subject, even for people really invested in social justice (at least the ones I know/hear about). In my experience, people talk about racism, but not from the angle of slavery.
Again, fair disclaimer: I'm not representing all of France, Europe or anything. I'm just a French person and this is my perspective on things.
> Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon
It is emphatically a US thing that irritates nearly every other culture (outside of some well-assimilated fringe groups). That said, the US exports it's culture far and wide in the guise of it's technological platforms. As such, you cannot escape it.
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
It's kind of a weird situation.
I've seen many examples of Europeans attempting to copy american wokeism, but without accounting for the different history.
It emanates out from the US for the most part, but the mentality has definitely infected most of the West.
In the UK, for example, police literally collect "non-crime hate incidents" and add them to people's criminal record. No due process, no actual convictions of crime, but you get a record of heresy accusations if you ask the government whether someone's broken the law.
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.
Ridiculous. The default branch being named "master" had nothing to do with the institution of slavery.
It was about state's rights.
>> 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.
Completely useless action.
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.
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.
The virtue signaling never ends.
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.
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 μήστωρ, Meister, Magister.
You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces.
> You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces
And yet you can have a sidepiece...
Also appears in audio
The final copy of that release, guess what they call it - master
Is everyone supposed to give up their Master's degrees?
Gotta call them 'really good' now
> You wont find someone who dares to rename masterpieces to mainpieces.
I guarantee you there is an activist insane enough to do just that.
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
>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.
The only way master was special was that it was the first branch, created automatically on the first commit. Everything after that is convention.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Why are people on the issue thread reporting that this has broken their builds when the change hasn't been applied yet?
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/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)
It does seem like a weird bug that this would cause errors https://github.com/estuary/flow/runs/5642694619?check_suite_... seems like it should be some kind of warning instead of an error?
It's about time to rename some of Metallica's songs too :)
Let's agree on "Pastor of Muppets."
Wokeism is going too far
So, I am the "main" person, above others. Well, that now broke down :)
Heman, and the mains of the universe.
grabs popcorn