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

There is a term for well intended, but useless attempts at inclusiveness: &quot;buttering the cat&quot;. I think this is a prime case.<p>Do we have to change &quot;master&#x27;s thesis&quot; or &quot;golden master&quot; or &quot;scrum master&quot;, too? No, because that is a different word!<p>Now what I really did find off-putting is the use of master in &quot;master and slave&quot;, as in IDE drives or in I2C. When I first heard it I didn&#x27;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.

&gt; 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.<p>Saving the world, one codebase at a time!

Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon? I&#x27;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.<p>I visited most of the world but as a tourist you don&#x27;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&#x27;s literally as if they don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;master&quot; had nothing to do with the institution of slavery.<p>It was about state&#x27;s rights.

&gt;&gt; Our entire product codebase and build pipeline is now broken.<p>&gt; Sorry . We&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;main&quot; as it&#x27;s 2 chars shorter, and more accurately descriptive.<p>The years-long transition where both namings are in use, will however be worse than either alone. This is always the way: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png</a>

Isn&#x27;t this solved by a large scale find-and-replace for existing scripts? Sure, the changes can be inconvenient but it&#x27;s not like a major API change or something. They&#x27;ve also been printing out warning messages since December 29th according to the issue, so I&#x27;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&#x27;t been applied yet?

It&#x27;s about time to rename some of Metallica&#x27;s songs too :)

Wokeism is going too far

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

Heman, and the mains of the universe.

<i>grabs popcorn</i>