Because you just created a massive amount of tech debt that needs to be addressed in the here and now without convincing people that creating this tech debt was worth creating in the first place and when there is a lot of other tech debt that actually matters that still hasn't been paid off.
Like someone else said here: "On one hand, here I am trying to get work done and on the other hand you have these people actively slowing me down. These people are my enemy"
This change only affects newly created repos, how does it create tech debt? I suppose some tooling may need to be updated, but if your tools are to brittle to support a different branch name.. sheesh
I would posit to your quotee that they're being phenomenally self-centered.
Github has been mum about the why behind this change, but I'd bet my hat it wasn't because they wanted to actively slow down't their users.
At my organization, we are being pressured to change existing repos to use "main" with the implication that we are racist if we do not. But even if we leave existing repos alone, now we all have to remember which repos use master and which ones use main. We tend to have people working across many different repos, so it's a headache waiting to happen either way.
> This change only affects newly created repos, how does it create tech debt? I suppose some tooling may need to be updated, but if your tools are to brittle to support a different branch name.. sheesh
This is overly dismissive. Build pipelines that interact with bespoke branches now need dynamism for backwards compatibility; a value that was previously static is now changeable. That doesn't really qualify as brittle to me; that any value in a codebase must be changeable is a ridiculous requirement from a codebase.
I work with build systems in my day-to-day, and I can't remember the last time I worked with something that didn't support dynamic branch names but did support git
But my experience is obviously skewed by where I work.
I'm specifically thinking of git-flow (https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/); every build system I've interacted with has been some flavor of this. The crux here is that there is a single branch that deploys occur from. Not uncommonly, this is the default branch.
But with every build system I work with (which are: Jenkins, Concourse, Github Actions, and Gitlab CI) you can make any branch you want the branch-to-build-on.
I don't mean to say that it's not totally fixable. Up until this change, it was a reasonable assumption for any org to make, that the default branch will be the same for all projects. Now, either the default branch on any new repo must be manually set to the old default, or the build system must be updated to handle non homogenous default branches.
Because you just created a massive amount of tech debt that needs to be addressed in the here and now without convincing people that creating this tech debt was worth creating in the first place and when there is a lot of other tech debt that actually matters that still hasn't been paid off.
Like someone else said here: "On one hand, here I am trying to get work done and on the other hand you have these people actively slowing me down. These people are my enemy"