I prefer to default to `develop` and then eventually branch out to `release`: that way my branch names are pretty explicit. It seemed silly to me to start with a "central" branch, no matter the wording, because that's not actually how Git works (and it's rather uninformative).
For... some in the comment section, please recall the HN guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I remember when default branch was simply `trunk`, but maybe that was in SVN not git… trunk goes well with branches, maybe git should stick (heh) to it
Which for some of us, Spanish speakers, was on occasion amusing or lewd, depending on the context and culture. The Spanish equivalent is 'tronco' which is very similar and it is slang for a couple of things.
Honest to God not something I care about but: this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for “master”. I do know some people _did_ care about the name. Sometimes surprisingly senior people who never supported a tech upgrade want the name changed. In any event, it’s done, “main” won, it’s fine, let’s move on.
Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.
I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo.
Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.
In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master
disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold.
I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”
This stuff reminds me of what my mother said about feminists trying to get people to spell women with a y. She didn't like it because it made feminism seem like something petty and frivolous.
If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
Same for me, but kind of because of DEI. Basically, it offended some people, and even if I thought it was a little overblown, it took about 2 minutes to change the default name of future repos to be something else (which was at least as good, and perhaps better). It made some people happier at approximately zero cost to myself, so why not.
I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part.
As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception.
As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions:
1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech.
2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage.
Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
> Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.
I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else.
We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one.
Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either.
Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.
That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to.
At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
Tip: the next time you need to name a function, don't use "a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything". That's not how you're supposed to name stuff in programming. :)
I once wrote a liblinux library for Linux software development with freestading C. One of the things I did was replace the "main" function with a "liblinux_start" function.
PSA: You can run one git command and ignore this change and associated drama entirely. I don't care which you prefer, but let's not pretend like main "won" when sticking with master is as easy as:
To be fair, ignoring the drama is just adapting to changes, which is crucial in this field. Our old repo defaulted to master, our new ones defaulted to main. No time was spent on bike shedding.
Curiously "man" is etymologically gender neutral, where wo/wif(man) denoted the female prefix for man, and the male dropped what would otherwise be were(man), seen in for example werewolf, which is gendered.
Has the Linux community thought through the implications of using words like "containerization", when millions of slaves are still shipped around in shipping containers [1]? Docker is problematic technology to say the least.
Yes, we ought to change "containerization" everywhere! In the Linux kernel, user-space, Docker, everywhere, only because people have difficulties with context-awareness! /s :D
Please IT people, tell me that this thing is absurd.
The whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness.
Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.
There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.
... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.
In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
It is based on nothing. It is not intended to be offensive, and it is not intended to be about slavery. Similarly how master and slave pins are not either, or how blacklist and whitelist are not about race either!
I grant it's not nothing, but I think it's not enough of something to make changes over it. Thinking of a master record or similar is the natural reaction when you learn about the terminology, and most young people have never used bitkeeper, so unless you go out of your way to explain why this is "bad" most people won't even know, so what do you gain from it?
Of course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it.
I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
Is it silly though? With enough linguistic archeology I bet you can make this entire comment I'm writing right now extremely problematic and offensive. The linguistic treadmill means exactly that older terms change meaning back in time. They also change meaning FORWARD in time, meaning your inoffensive terms today will almost certainly be offensive in the future.
It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English.
The cost is measured primarily in time. Experts in git/GitHub just experience a little annoyance (per repo). But for new comers (esp self-learners) the cost is much higher (takes the form of dysfunctional instructions, tutorials, readmes), and at the margin could cause someone to give up on a tutorial.
Cost should be weighed up against benefits i.e. that those hurt or upset by use of the word 'master' would no longer be. It's highly questionable whether the term master ever upset anyone (not simply those who were upset by the idea that someone else could be upset by the term's use).
A second-order cost is the precedent. There isn't a word in the English language which cannot be interpreted as malevolent given enough effort from the interpreter. Therefore it can be a better strategy to accept that there exist words with multiple meanings depending on context, and live with this language feature/imperfection, rather than impose costly changes on everyone to benefit a (possibly non-existent) few.
Implying perfectly reasonable inquiry (namely, if 'master' is to be removed, why aren't other 'problematic' terms?) is a "jerk" for asking seems off to me.
This is a nitpick, dismissing others' questions and directing them to let it go, is overreach. That's not for you to determine. It's fine as a suggestion (especially if accompanied with your perception of why they ought to), but as a directive it comes across as though you assume you know what's better for someone else without evidence to support the assumption, or without it occurring to you that your assumption would be questioned.
I agree the case for changing words like man, kill, and abort is weak (so weak that you perceived it as a joke), but the case for changing those words isn’t significantly weaker than was the case for changing master, and master was indeed changed. OP is right to question why the weak arguments in favour of changing master won, and if this shall continue unchecked.
I'm with you on the cost basis for this. It makes no sense to die on this hill.
But to answer your question, it's unclear how "inclusive" this actually is. No person of color I've talked to about this (at least 3 that I can recall) has thought this was anything other than weird virtue signaling by admittedly mostly white social justice warriors. Their feelings on "master" terminology ranged from mild bemusement to "I REALLY DON'T GIVE A SHIT."
If the only people being "included" by this are people whom are themselves being uninclusive, even if for the right reasons... I question how "inclusive" this actually is.
That said, I'm definitely in the idgaf camp. My new repos are "main" because that's the default. Most of my old repos are still "master" because I never bothered to change it.
If there was a case where that was more than a quantum of annoyance, where it actually was any kind of actual weight at all, maybe those incredibly small feelings might be interesting to weigh. But they're not. They're the smallest of feelings, weighing nothing. Making this change is the easiest lightest most obviously acceptable of wins.
This is such a weirdly patronizing comment. What exactly makes the feelings of the people who cried about the original name "bigger" than those of the people who don't like the change?
I think those people are taken into account, and on balance are ignored because their argument is far less reasonable. "Slavery was one of the most awful things humans have ever done so we shouldn't continue to use the language of slavery to describe every day things because that diminishes the importance of our history" makes a lot more sense than "we should keep this terminology because it's tradition."
But as I said elsewhere, I do not care about that a lot. However, I do think those words are bad for other reasons because they do not illustrate the _actual_ role and relationships of branches in a VCS in a _good way_. If the master branch is not actually ruling over other branches, then it should be named something else, like "primary" as far as I am concerned.
PS: about the role in git: I don't feel that strongly about it, but I think master is somewhat more descriptive. The master branch contains the most up-to-date version of the source code, so e.g. if I'm working on a feature branch and a colleague pushes a bug fix that affects me into master, I need to merge/rebase to get the latest changes into my feature branch. So, while the master branch doesn't "rule" the feature branches, there is still the implication that changes to master should find there way into the feature branches at some point, which I think main doesn't convey that clearly.
Language is in constant flux. If a word has a remote historical connection to master/slave in a precursor project people nowadays don't even know, and people invent a "folk etymology" comparing it to a master record, do you really gain anything worthwhile from insisting on the history?
> Except the master branch has nothing to do with slavery.
It did, it originated from Bitkeeper that literally used to the term "slave" to refer to non-master branches.
> It's more like 'master bedroom.'
This is even more ridiculous. Where do you think that term came from? What made that a master bedroom in comparison to the other bedrooms? Could it be because that was the one the master was sleeping in, in comparison to the ones slaves were sleeping in?
There are many more kinds of masters than just owners of slaves. The word "master bedroom" only appeared in 1920, it has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
No, that's just one of those made-up lies people repeat often enough online to become "true" because it's the top search result and because it makes them feel good about continuing to use that term.
> TO LET, Westmoeath Cottage and Garden, situated near to Cook's River, only
three miles from the city. the cottage contains
parlour and drawing room,and four large bed rooms ;
detached kitchen, bakehouse, landry, storeroom,
four stall stable and double coach-house, servants'
rooms neatly fitted up, together with hay-loft and
granary, school house and master's bed-room. A
cottage containing four separate rooms for overseer
and workmen ; two excellent wells of water on the
premises, about six acres of garden neatly laid out
and planted with the best vines and fruit trees,
'This property is fit for a family of the first
respectability.
You couldn't own slaves in London in 1845, and in any case the name derives from the "Master of the household", so if you want to be mad about it, you should call it sexist, not racist. Or you could just be chill, stretch the meaning a bit and say the couple together are the masters of the household.
But, now I'm curious: Where do you draw the line? You don't like git master branches and master bedrooms, but what about other uses?
You can have a master key, master record, master a skill, create a masterwork, be a master to an apprentice, join the toastmasters, be a master of ceremonies at a formal event, you can dress up for comic con as Master Yoda, Master Chief, or Dumbledore (the Headmaster of Hogwarts), you can be a Master Chief in the US Navy, be the dungeon master for a game of D&D, get a Masters' Degree and so on.
Which of these things are in your opinion bad and should be renamed?
This is very much like asking why are you focused on fixing one bug at a time in your software when you can fix every reported bug simultaneously?
I don't know man, maybe it's because fixing this one completely inconsequential bug faces so much backlash for no particular reason other than "change bad"?
And well done with using an example from a book series where the only Asian character is named Cho Chang and where there are elves with long noses in charge of the "central bank". That really works in your favour, you totally owned me [pun intended] with that one!
> A footman in his lordship's service stated he went into his master's bedroom [...]
isn't an example of the phrase "master bedroom".
I am also skeptical of "school house and master's bedroom". The main cottage has "four large bed rooms". Why would the "master bedroom", if it is meant to be read as it is today, be listed after the list of detached outbuildings?
Because you're thinking of homes in the modern term where one married couple owns one home and shares it with their children until they become adults and move out, instead of thinking of it as generational homes where 3-4 generations of the same family lived together.
So a master historically is not a 30-something year-old but his father in his 50s or 60s that actually owned the estate and wanted some privacy for him and his wife, hence a smaller, detached building away from the "main" building. The main building is where the master's sons and yet-unmarried daughters lived alongside the grandkids, hence needing more rooms, hence it being bigger than the building where the master lived.
I can't believe I have to explain something so basic.
"Was"? There are millions of people in slavery in the US penal system today. Entire cities like Dubai continue to be built by slaves. I, for one, find it to be extremely insulting towards their intelligence to think that unrelated use of the word "master" in a different context is somehow considered to be offensive.
Because it goes hand-in-hand with the euphemism treadmill. I defer to the late great George Carlin's words on the subject:
I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.
Correction: it costs something (breaking with past convention which adds friction), and it makes some people unhappy and others unhappy. This is not a harmless, all-upside change the way you are making it out to be.
As someone who has seen black colleagues happily using master/slave terminology in new code (embedded systems so this was around I2C devices), and the only one or two developers I’ve worked with who tried to push this renaming being white - I have two issues:
First, I think it’s just a dangerous idea that people have to be so coddled and be ‘protected’ from seeing words that aren’t slurs and have either no contextual relationship or only very tenuous relationship to actually sensitive concepts (‘master’ has many meanings divorced from African slavery and git never had slave branches so plenty of other senses of the word apply). I feel like it’s going so far that anybody who needs this probably haven’t yet really achieved the resilience needed to operate in the real world.
And secondly, since none of the black developers I worked with actually cared about it, it feels like it’s not great to do something and think you’ve done your bit for racism prevention when you’ve done nothing that makes any real difference to it!
no. I just had flashbacks on how many scripts I had to change and build edge cases in back then when they changed master and slave in mysql.
But everything to make slaves happy and not feel triggered I guess.
> This change does hurt people. Have you never seen a newbie struggle with an out of date tutorial? There’s fifteen years of books, tutorials, videos, and other learning material out there that assumes the use of `master`. It takes about a decade for these things to die off in the clear-cut cases. However this is not even a clear-cut case, because Git defaults to `master` and GitHub defaults to `main`, so the confusion will last longer.
> Version control is a hard enough concept to grasp well at the best of times. And now there’s going to be a bunch of newbies – many of whom will be black – getting frustrated and confused because they are following the tutorials as best as they can and not getting the results they expect. On balance, there is probably more harm done to black developers with this change than leaving things as they were. Haven’t you ever seen a young developer lose confidence when they are trying the best they can to follow instructions and it’s just not working? Disliking the fact that this is being done to new developers thoughtlessly is not “pointless”.
> There’s also the matter that everybody I have seen advocating for this change has been white, and the responses I have seen from black developers generally ranges from “this is pointless” to “this is [performative / virtue signalling]” (insert appropriate term depending upon whether they are left or right wing). People start with the assumption that this is clearly the right thing to do for black developers, but people assuming that don’t seem to be actually listening to black developers about this, or at the very least, only listen to the ones that agree with them.
> This could have been done in a better way – coördinate with the main Git project around changing the default across the board, plan an update to as much documentation as possible, and make it happen in sync. But GitHub charged in unilaterally, seemingly with an overactive case of a white saviour complex, with people like you telling everybody ”this change hurts nobody”. This was done in an entirely thoughtless manner and does hurt people.
Beyond what I originally wrote, you also had ridiculousness like `git init` creating a branch called `main` if you install Git through Apple developer tools and `git init` creating a branch called `master` if you install Git through Homebrew; or getting a repo with `main` if you initialise the repo on GitHub and then clone it locally, but getting a repo with `master` if you initialise the repo locally then push to GitHub.
I don’t especially care what the default is, but I do care that GitHub didn’t seem to give a shit about the disruption they caused as long as they looked like they were performing racial justice of some kind (whilst having zero black people in leadership!). Why wasn’t the change centralised through the Git project so everybody could make the change together?
Eh, that's some interesting historical trivia, but I don't see how that matters tbh. If everybody is fine with the word because they (quite reasonably) assume it was inspired by master record or something similar, and you bring up some 25 year old history (20 years when the debate got started) about not even git but a precursor, does that really help with anything? I am sure there are other innocuous seeming words that have a dark etymology, should we go search for them so we can update the language?
Yeah. Advanced Direct Connect p2p is using TIGER Tree Hash. Gnutella2 p2p is using TIGER Tree Hash. There is BitTorrent format extension to include per-file TTH, implemented by EAD TorrentBuild. For best performance we should also get rid of pointless per-block hashes in torrent files.
TTH is universal for p2p, and yet developers choose another hashes, making their tools not ready for p2p.
My lovely Mercurial is unfortunately also not ready for p2p
All the woke stuff was so annoying past 5 years. I don't remember the company name but it was one of those feature flag toggle companies. For a year straight they communicated this change they were doing, basically replacing blacklist and whitelist with more PC terms. Someone at the company decided to not only make it a recommended change, but that the old usage would BREAK the app. They couldn't handle the word blacklist in the codebase so much that they were willing to punish their users. It felt like I was getting an email from them every 5 days for a year.
That all being said - main is shorter than master and I would say most of us here, probably 95%, are "used to it" and it would actually be annoying to go back to master.
Huh. I always visualized "trunk" as some kind of chest where all the code was stored. Somehow it never occurred to me to think about trees. What a weird feeling.
Following the logic of the master rename though, should we even then use the terms “tree” or “branch”, since so many people were murdered by being hanged from them in lynchings?
I’m disappointed that this headline will lead to more clicks. This is your reminder that in git the branch name is just a pointer to a commit. Renaming that pointer is relatively seamless on GitHub (https://github.com/github/renaming?tab=readme-ov-file#rename...). Also, git 3.0 isn’t forcing this change on existing repos, just new ones that no automation depends on. And if you really like the old name that’s always an option for your repos. Remember, it’s just a pointer.
The other git 3.0 changes are more consequential and worthy of discussion - changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security and performance, changing the storage format for performance and introducing Rust.
SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.
Turns out people really, really, REALLY don't like to be forced to change their decades old thinking, vocabulary and definitions of words when they feel its either pointless busy work, propagation of an ideology they do not support or a straight up attempt at mind control.
From a third-world perspective, it feels like American politics being injected into the developer domain because of some previous biases that Americans had. Which is sad for a community that claims to be global.
Lots of Americans don't support this either. Of course, that doesn't actually matter to the people who have pushed this change through. They think that it's a righteous change, so it doesn't matter whom it annoys.
Lots of non Americans support the change too. Master was a terrible default name, switching it to a better name that’s also more inclusive language was a good idea. Where American politics infected things was the the reactionary response of people who are vehemently opposed to any attempt to fix problems that don’t directly effect them.
This whole 'master branch' outrage doesn't even make sense. Should saying things like:
"I've mastered computer programming." also be an offense?
We absolutely should deny and disregard these nonsensical demands _by principle_. What was even the actual case made by people who wanted this? And don't tell me "well it's not a big deal, just accept it don't whine about something so small", because that won't fly, or shouldn't at least.
You can go read the justification in a million places, I’m not going to repeat it badly here.
From your tone I see you’d like to have an argument. While I’m sure that will make you feel good about yourself on this dull Monday morning, I doubt it will result in much valuable interchange of perspective.
I suppose the justification was not heavy enough. Master's degrees, master bedrooms, mastering a skill, and calling someone a master of their craft, in fact, still exist, and nobody seems to complain about thouse funnily enough. Just admit that this just bs.
Adulthood is about realizing people who 'just want to do real work' will always be fucked over by people who vocalize their needs and organize like-minded ones, justified or not.
Don't know why people here got triggered by DEI, but the "master" naming is just bad, "main" is actually a better and more generic description.
The word "master" means someone/thing that has the capability of controlling things, like "Mastered", "Master Degree" etc.
But in most Git contexts, "master" is just "one of the breach that we hand picked to put our finest results in", that's not mastering anything, it just means "if you know what's best for you (or not), just use this one".
Another similar wording is in IDE hard drives. Remember the fun time where you can to setup jumpers before your secondary IDE hard drive would work? Yeah that secondary drive is called "slave". I'm still confused why the first drive must be called "master" since I never see it whipping any other drives to make them work harder or really doing anything that's remotely controlling.
The computer guys in the old times really have a weird taste in naming things.
I think you're missing the historical context[0]. It came from "master-slave architecture" which has an older history. It's why we refer to a master copy of a photo or document too.
I really don't care if it's main or master tbh. But is anyone actually offended?
For IDE you are mixing up 2 separate concepts. The addressing primary/secondary is purely addressing, I don't recall seeing "Master/Slave" in relation to that. Labeling on HDDs I've seen always used primary/secondary
Where the master terminology comes in is that a certain version of ATA added bus mastering DMA from the drive. Maybe some harddisks had a jumper to disable or enable that
This is verifiably untrue. Older IDE hard drives commonly used master and slave on their printed labels instead of primary and secondary. Google “ide drive master slave” images and you’ll see plenty of examples.
I don’t say this to justify sticking with the older terms, just to assert that they were actually used.
Well said. I think the slavery connotations in Git are not a big deal. But I have always disliked the word "master" because it never seemed well-suited for what role it played in the version control sphere. Labels like "main" or "primary" always seemed like better words to me, so I am glad that this change was made.
You betray your own ignorance. Master has been used historically to refer to the "final" or "canonical" copy. For example, you make copies of a CD based on the master. Creating that master copy is called mastering.
The word "master" stems from Latin, meaning "great" or "teacher". Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
Any slavery related connotations is insanely recent, and arguably manufactured specifically for the purpose of linguistic censorship. Historically, slave owners were referred to as... owners.
The "final" or "canonical" argument can only indicates that the word "master" has multiple meanings, which is not a really special. Tho, "Master Degree" really means teaching, my bad.
> Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
In the Git context, the "canonical" way to use git is that you merge/copy data _from_ other branches, such as `wip` or `dev`, _back to_ `master` or `main`, not the other way around.
All and all, it's done, OK? Don't like it? Hey, you can still use "master", just customize it. But you'll probably piss some people if you do, and then you have to dig out your dictionary again and again. Choice wisely.
Seeing some of the complaints around this feels like people are somehow still stuck in 2020 instead of 2025. People need to do a fresh pull down from main and update their arguments.
Frankly I don't really care either way, main is shorter and conveys the same meaning so by my metrics it's better. You can override the default to be whatever you want.
For... some in the comment section, please recall the HN guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo.
Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.
I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>
It's master as in "master copy":
A "master copy" is an original version of a work from which other copies are made, serving as the definitive or controlling version
If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.
As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception.
As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions:
1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech.
2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage.
Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else.
We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one.
Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either.
Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.
At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.
Glad it's going back to having a default and not asking.
Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway
I had a few frustrated evenings of debugging when Github changed the default to main and my local scripts expected "master".
All fixed now, but still an annoyance. Don't think about it much anymore.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/slavery-in-libya-li...
Please IT people, tell me that this thing is absurd.
Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.
There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.
... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.
In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
BitKeeper, the VCS that preceded Git, used the terminology "master" and "slaves", so the association is not based on nothing:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f1...
I do not mind blocklistd, but then again, there was nothing wrong with blacklistd either.
I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English.
Everyone needs to stop this nonsense.
"Ände" is a slur? (excuse my lack of transductional skills)
The cost is measured primarily in time. Experts in git/GitHub just experience a little annoyance (per repo). But for new comers (esp self-learners) the cost is much higher (takes the form of dysfunctional instructions, tutorials, readmes), and at the margin could cause someone to give up on a tutorial.
Cost should be weighed up against benefits i.e. that those hurt or upset by use of the word 'master' would no longer be. It's highly questionable whether the term master ever upset anyone (not simply those who were upset by the idea that someone else could be upset by the term's use).
A second-order cost is the precedent. There isn't a word in the English language which cannot be interpreted as malevolent given enough effort from the interpreter. Therefore it can be a better strategy to accept that there exist words with multiple meanings depending on context, and live with this language feature/imperfection, rather than impose costly changes on everyone to benefit a (possibly non-existent) few.
This is a nitpick, dismissing others' questions and directing them to let it go, is overreach. That's not for you to determine. It's fine as a suggestion (especially if accompanied with your perception of why they ought to), but as a directive it comes across as though you assume you know what's better for someone else without evidence to support the assumption, or without it occurring to you that your assumption would be questioned.
But to answer your question, it's unclear how "inclusive" this actually is. No person of color I've talked to about this (at least 3 that I can recall) has thought this was anything other than weird virtue signaling by admittedly mostly white social justice warriors. Their feelings on "master" terminology ranged from mild bemusement to "I REALLY DON'T GIVE A SHIT."
If the only people being "included" by this are people whom are themselves being uninclusive, even if for the right reasons... I question how "inclusive" this actually is.
That said, I'm definitely in the idgaf camp. My new repos are "main" because that's the default. Most of my old repos are still "master" because I never bothered to change it.
We fix things that are broken. That's progress.
But as I said elsewhere, I do not care about that a lot. However, I do think those words are bad for other reasons because they do not illustrate the _actual_ role and relationships of branches in a VCS in a _good way_. If the master branch is not actually ruling over other branches, then it should be named something else, like "primary" as far as I am concerned.
It did, it originated from Bitkeeper that literally used to the term "slave" to refer to non-master branches.
> It's more like 'master bedroom.'
This is even more ridiculous. Where do you think that term came from? What made that a master bedroom in comparison to the other bedrooms? Could it be because that was the one the master was sleeping in, in comparison to the ones slaves were sleeping in?
Here it is for example in an Australian newspaper ad from 1844: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31742822
> TO LET, Westmoeath Cottage and Garden, situated near to Cook's River, only three miles from the city. the cottage contains parlour and drawing room,and four large bed rooms ; detached kitchen, bakehouse, landry, storeroom, four stall stable and double coach-house, servants' rooms neatly fitted up, together with hay-loft and granary, school house and master's bed-room. A cottage containing four separate rooms for overseer and workmen ; two excellent wells of water on the premises, about six acres of garden neatly laid out and planted with the best vines and fruit trees, 'This property is fit for a family of the first respectability.
Or here it is in London-based The Examiner from 1845: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/The_Exam... (page 523, middle row, a couple of lines below the "Police" headline)
I'm sure I could find more examples, but I think two will sufface.
I don't know man, maybe it's because fixing this one completely inconsequential bug faces so much backlash for no particular reason other than "change bad"?
And well done with using an example from a book series where the only Asian character is named Cho Chang and where there are elves with long noses in charge of the "central bank". That really works in your favour, you totally owned me [pun intended] with that one!
isn't an example of the phrase "master bedroom".
I am also skeptical of "school house and master's bedroom". The main cottage has "four large bed rooms". Why would the "master bedroom", if it is meant to be read as it is today, be listed after the list of detached outbuildings?
So a master historically is not a 30-something year-old but his father in his 50s or 60s that actually owned the estate and wanted some privacy for him and his wife, hence a smaller, detached building away from the "main" building. The main building is where the master's sons and yet-unmarried daughters lived alongside the grandkids, hence needing more rooms, hence it being bigger than the building where the master lived.
I can't believe I have to explain something so basic.
First, I think it’s just a dangerous idea that people have to be so coddled and be ‘protected’ from seeing words that aren’t slurs and have either no contextual relationship or only very tenuous relationship to actually sensitive concepts (‘master’ has many meanings divorced from African slavery and git never had slave branches so plenty of other senses of the word apply). I feel like it’s going so far that anybody who needs this probably haven’t yet really achieved the resilience needed to operate in the real world.
And secondly, since none of the black developers I worked with actually cared about it, it feels like it’s not great to do something and think you’ve done your bit for racism prevention when you’ve done nothing that makes any real difference to it!
If your definition of "people" is "armchair political activists with nothing better to do with their lives", then yes.
> This change does hurt people. Have you never seen a newbie struggle with an out of date tutorial? There’s fifteen years of books, tutorials, videos, and other learning material out there that assumes the use of `master`. It takes about a decade for these things to die off in the clear-cut cases. However this is not even a clear-cut case, because Git defaults to `master` and GitHub defaults to `main`, so the confusion will last longer.
> Version control is a hard enough concept to grasp well at the best of times. And now there’s going to be a bunch of newbies – many of whom will be black – getting frustrated and confused because they are following the tutorials as best as they can and not getting the results they expect. On balance, there is probably more harm done to black developers with this change than leaving things as they were. Haven’t you ever seen a young developer lose confidence when they are trying the best they can to follow instructions and it’s just not working? Disliking the fact that this is being done to new developers thoughtlessly is not “pointless”.
> There’s also the matter that everybody I have seen advocating for this change has been white, and the responses I have seen from black developers generally ranges from “this is pointless” to “this is [performative / virtue signalling]” (insert appropriate term depending upon whether they are left or right wing). People start with the assumption that this is clearly the right thing to do for black developers, but people assuming that don’t seem to be actually listening to black developers about this, or at the very least, only listen to the ones that agree with them.
> This could have been done in a better way – coördinate with the main Git project around changing the default across the board, plan an update to as much documentation as possible, and make it happen in sync. But GitHub charged in unilaterally, seemingly with an overactive case of a white saviour complex, with people like you telling everybody ”this change hurts nobody”. This was done in an entirely thoughtless manner and does hurt people.
— https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/jtrx1k/announcement_po...
Beyond what I originally wrote, you also had ridiculousness like `git init` creating a branch called `main` if you install Git through Apple developer tools and `git init` creating a branch called `master` if you install Git through Homebrew; or getting a repo with `main` if you initialise the repo on GitHub and then clone it locally, but getting a repo with `master` if you initialise the repo locally then push to GitHub.
I don’t especially care what the default is, but I do care that GitHub didn’t seem to give a shit about the disruption they caused as long as they looked like they were performing racial justice of some kind (whilst having zero black people in leadership!). Why wasn’t the change centralised through the Git project so everybody could make the change together?
https://web.archive.org/web/20201001133529/https://github.co...
Fortunately, with this change, everything will return to being in sync.
Git's concept of a master branch was borrowed from BitKeeper which used master/slave terminology. https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...
Some people weren't evidently.
If this blocks you from "just want to do real work" maybe overthink your setup and adjust your pipelines?
Their current state of "decentralization" is "the developer might still have a copy of the repo on his laptop".
TTH is universal for p2p, and yet developers choose another hashes, making their tools not ready for p2p.
My lovely Mercurial is unfortunately also not ready for p2p
That all being said - main is shorter than master and I would say most of us here, probably 95%, are "used to it" and it would actually be annoying to go back to master.
What does this mean, to compile git v3 I will need Rust ?
As for 'main' I always used that, I do not know how that happened since I use git the say way I used RCS ages ago.
The other git 3.0 changes are more consequential and worthy of discussion - changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security and performance, changing the storage format for performance and introducing Rust.
Linus has a different view, he referred to the SHA-256 migration as "pointless churn": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCr_gb8rdEI?t=11m
SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.
Except for automations that happen to create new repositories.
How come such a marginal group of terminally butthurt people have so much control. I don't get it.
We absolutely should deny and disregard these nonsensical demands _by principle_. What was even the actual case made by people who wanted this? And don't tell me "well it's not a big deal, just accept it don't whine about something so small", because that won't fly, or shouldn't at least.
From your tone I see you’d like to have an argument. While I’m sure that will make you feel good about yourself on this dull Monday morning, I doubt it will result in much valuable interchange of perspective.
The word "master" means someone/thing that has the capability of controlling things, like "Mastered", "Master Degree" etc.
But in most Git contexts, "master" is just "one of the breach that we hand picked to put our finest results in", that's not mastering anything, it just means "if you know what's best for you (or not), just use this one".
Another similar wording is in IDE hard drives. Remember the fun time where you can to setup jumpers before your secondary IDE hard drive would work? Yeah that secondary drive is called "slave". I'm still confused why the first drive must be called "master" since I never see it whipping any other drives to make them work harder or really doing anything that's remotely controlling.
The computer guys in the old times really have a weird taste in naming things.
I really don't care if it's main or master tbh. But is anyone actually offended?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_(technolo...
Where the master terminology comes in is that a certain version of ATA added bus mastering DMA from the drive. Maybe some harddisks had a jumper to disable or enable that
I don’t say this to justify sticking with the older terms, just to assert that they were actually used.
The word "master" stems from Latin, meaning "great" or "teacher". Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
Any slavery related connotations is insanely recent, and arguably manufactured specifically for the purpose of linguistic censorship. Historically, slave owners were referred to as... owners.
> Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
In the Git context, the "canonical" way to use git is that you merge/copy data _from_ other branches, such as `wip` or `dev`, _back to_ `master` or `main`, not the other way around.
All and all, it's done, OK? Don't like it? Hey, you can still use "master", just customize it. But you'll probably piss some people if you do, and then you have to dig out your dictionary again and again. Choice wisely.
Frankly I don't really care either way, main is shorter and conveys the same meaning so by my metrics it's better. You can override the default to be whatever you want.