Oh, how upset I was by that decision. I still call out GitHub online every now and then thanking them for solving slavery by messing up my deployment scripts and development environments.
Had to refresh my memory, it’s been a while. They didn’t change branch on existing projects, but they did change it on new repos to main by default. Our tools indeed created repositories and configured everything for the developer automatically. However GitHub’s policy meant that you had to either change the tools to detect whether they are working with old repo or new, or go to every new project after automatic configuration fails, configure default branch and then rerun the tool. Same thing then happened to few of our tools that were used for CI.
All in all they made more work for us for no reason other than be smug about it and it changed exactly nothing.
So your tooling was at fault for assuming something that has always been declared a convention not a rule. It is like assuming we will never reach the year 2000 and there only storing the last to digits for the year…
They forced the change. If I wanted otherwise, I had to go and specify per project that master was the default branch, and there were many of those. And whole “insanely fragile” is just nonsense or are you trying to tell me people have conditions and scripts that detects what’s the default branch and use that instead of assuming default name that hasn’t changed for 15 years would remain default?
Whether you like Linus or not, whatever is released to users stops being a bug and becomes a feature. Not breaking user-space is a must. Instead they achieved nothing and caused a lot of unnecessary work to a lot of developers.
Oh, how upset I was by that decision. I still call out GitHub online every now and then thanking them for solving slavery by messing up my deployment scripts and development environments.
I use GitHub and all my older repos have a master branch with no forced change. When did they force a change? I think you are mistaken.
Had to refresh my memory, it’s been a while. They didn’t change branch on existing projects, but they did change it on new repos to main by default. Our tools indeed created repositories and configured everything for the developer automatically. However GitHub’s policy meant that you had to either change the tools to detect whether they are working with old repo or new, or go to every new project after automatic configuration fails, configure default branch and then rerun the tool. Same thing then happened to few of our tools that were used for CI.
All in all they made more work for us for no reason other than be smug about it and it changed exactly nothing.
So your tooling was at fault for assuming something that has always been declared a convention not a rule. It is like assuming we will never reach the year 2000 and there only storing the last to digits for the year…
I think this is an excuse. Using the CLI you can easily create and specify the default branch. It’s also not difficult to check the branch name.
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Wait did GitHub retroactively change existing master branches to main, or was your stuff insanely fragile?
They never forced a retroactive change
They forced the change. If I wanted otherwise, I had to go and specify per project that master was the default branch, and there were many of those. And whole “insanely fragile” is just nonsense or are you trying to tell me people have conditions and scripts that detects what’s the default branch and use that instead of assuming default name that hasn’t changed for 15 years would remain default?
Whether you like Linus or not, whatever is released to users stops being a bug and becomes a feature. Not breaking user-space is a must. Instead they achieved nothing and caused a lot of unnecessary work to a lot of developers.