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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#121

Post by 3saryHg6LP2e »

terse_malvolio wrote: post #106
3saryHg6LP2e wrote: post #54

Christ, I agree with this article so much it hurts. I am convinced future people will find this whole saga quite an interesting anecdote of how, for a period of time, _appearing_ to be "anti-racist" was far more important than doing anything positive. As an aside I find it highly amusing watching the proponents of such changes eat themselves (see Twitch: womxn debacle).

It also mislabels racism as something that can be fixed by modulating language, as if it was a character flaw an not a human flaw . An optical illusion isn't fixed just because you cover it from view with a piece of tape.

Well, certainly there is language that is completely inappropriate, imagine what the default branch name _could_ be called if we really were attempting to be non-inclusive.

It's very, very clear what language that applies to, however.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#122

Post by ismaildonmez »

A good article about this naming issue - https://reason.com/2020/08/12/is-your-master-bedroom-racist/

For me, it seems like since no one dares to solve real problems like Police violence, income gap, real racism that's ingrained in the society (like people calling the police because a black guy is wandering around), they pick up some non-issue and dress it like a problem and solve it.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#124

Post by turbonoobie »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #10

> Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive terminology from our collective lexicon. There were several casualties, white/blacklist are examples of words deemed to be too offensive to use. In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being intro…

CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day..

One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.

It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.

Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.

We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.

A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.

/idealistic early morning rant over

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#125

Post by powerapple »

dsun180 wrote: post #21
sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

Same here in germany. When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university. I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.

Of course everyone would have a different feeling towards those words. Every country has their own history. I think it is a positive step in the US going through all these hurdles to address their past. US has the power and the economic leverage to really step to next level, it can afford it.

Every country is different. Developing world wouldn't care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.

Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw 'main' branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#126

Post by benrbray »

vmception wrote: post #47

I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…

In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the "Twitter left", comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of "leftists" whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.

Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.

I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#127

Post by xyproto »

I fully agree that changing master to main doesn't really solve anything. When supporting people, they should be supported in a way that matters.

git itself changing the default branch name to main was a sufficiently good reason for me to go for main as the default branch name for my projects as well. It's a central project and their decision carries weight, regardless of their motivation.

If people choose to use main for their new projects, I see the argument for also renaming master to main for older projects, to be able to have a slightly more uniform git workflow on the command line. It depends on the project if making this change outweighs the hassle.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#128

Post by iamflimflam1 »

throwaheyy wrote: post #101
enriquto wrote: post #77

I'm a bit late to the game, but I don't understand what this fuss is all about, from a technical point of view. I just created a git repo this morning and the default branch was named "master" (using the git command line). Then I pushed it to github to make it visible, as I have done several times before. The command line instructions at the "new repository" interface on github suggest changing the branch name to mai…

Sure, it’s fine and easy if you’re starting a project today. But if you have any build or deployment automation that interacts with git repos for existing projects it will be broken by the change.

That doesn't really make sense? If you have existing git repos they will still have a branch called master.

GitHub did not go into existing repositories and change the names of existing branches.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#129

Post by INTPenis »

cheschire wrote: post #16

Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good. edit: Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which…

Everything changes, language changes, but I wonder if erasing negative words might make us forget their meaning and repeat the history behind them.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#130

Post by jansan »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #95
sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

You had 700 years to get over it. Harboring bad emotions is negative for all involved.

Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP's post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP's country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.
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