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.

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

> 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!

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.