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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#131

Post by jholman »

jpm48 wrote: post #24

This explains my WTF moment when teaching a class full of students to push to the github classroom using push -u origin master and it being rejected and having to use main!

Yeah. For my own projects, and/or on my own command-line, I don't care what "ma" resolves to. "main" is not a terrible choice.

But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.

In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#132

Post by enriquto »

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.

But they did not rename any existing repositories (that would be in very bad taste!). Such an automatic renaming would possibly break a lot of scripts, but this is not what is happening. All old repositories still have their branch names intact. The new repositories can have whatever name you choose.

What does "the change" actually do? Is it just in the "new repository" instructions or is there some automated process that may fail? Maybe I'm missing a way to create github repositories besides the "New" button on your user page?

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#133

Post by skrebbel »

I teach 2 git classes each year. I used to use GitHub for the pull/push section of the class, but last autumn half the class got stuck with branch name mismatches.

I switched to GitLab in the next class.

Surely this is just anecdata, but it seems to me that there can be real commercial consequences to letting your business get hijacked by the thought police.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#134

Post by zimpenfish »

tda wrote: post #12

Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is. Same thing with p…

> as it distracts from addressing the root cause.

This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".

> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.

Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)

[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#135

Post by rendall »

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…

The name change, which despite its being easy for you, will cause confusion and higher barriers-to-entry to new devs who will need to sort out older tutorials and manuals from new ones. This is but one foreseeable consequence among other potentially unintended and unforseen consequences.

This because an exceedingly tiny group of people at the best, most charitable interpretation of their motives, wilfully misapprehend that 'master' refers to more than their narrow concerns.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#137

Post by niceairport »

gspr wrote: post #81

There are parts of this article I agree with, and parts I disagree with, but this part just screaaaaams "I cannot possibly picture that any part of the world is in any way different from the US": > “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy p…

That's when the author has lost me as well. Pretty ironic to mock meritocracy in an article that quickly devolved into a full-on rant.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#138

Post by zimpenfish »

turbonoobie wrote: post #124
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 an…

> We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people.

Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#139

Post by gspr »

user-the-name wrote: post #117
gspr wrote: post #81

There are parts of this article I agree with, and parts I disagree with, but this part just screaaaaams "I cannot possibly picture that any part of the world is in any way different from the US": > “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy p…

The writer is not from the US.

Oh, interesting. Do you know where they're from? It sounds to me like it must be a place that's very Americanized, for sure.

Edit: Nevermind, I misread the paragraph about London as being just a story about something happening in London, rather than abeing about something that happened to the author in London.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#140

Post by dijit »

jholman wrote: post #102
dijit wrote: post #15

it should be noted that git (the binary) is also in the process of deprecating `master`. This is the message I get on my machine when running git init: hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call: hint: hint: git config --global ini…

Why do you think this means that git is deprecating master? Similarly, GitHub claims that git is making similar changes, and links to a "Statement" that actually says the opposite, and a code change that also does not include anything like making that change (both are from June 2020). Since GitHub's claim is obviously in error, I wonder if it's malice or incompetence. Is there some other evidence that git is going to…

Based on my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26488240

The 'hint' is nicely worded, but there is sufficient evidence of a pending name change (likely to `main`) for the default.

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