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.
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.
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.
Do you even realize how ridiculous these nonsensical "arguments" sound?
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 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.
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.
But then the 2024 elections happened, along with a bunch of exit polls, voter interviews, and other data showing that a surprising (to me anyway) number of people hate this kind of virtue signalling to the point that it can sway their vote. It's very possible those swung votes have ushered in a host of harmful changes that I think do matter a great deal. So now I'm sick of this stuff, it's not only a waste of time it's actively harmful.
This works really well to whip people into an othering frenzy to distract them from voting for their own economic interests.
It wasn't the multiple dedicated Neo-Nazi propaganda networks that call all minorities and immigrants and political opponents enemies of the state.
It wasn't the election of politicians that are actual, convicted rapists and felons who distract by pointing to those who can't fight back.
Don’t fool yourself kiddo, you were always an asshole, you were just waiting for the right excuse, just like the rest of us.
The deal with progressive ideology is that it progresses. Fixing inequality, prejudice, and injustice are a lifelong project, because as fast as you address issues, bigots will create new things to be bullies about. You don’t get to just get off at some point and be like “oh okay things seem good enough now.”
Good Lord, just listen to yourself.
Red-lined districts still shape America to this day and several red states have been rampant on racial districting to screw minority communities. You can't even pretend the history of slavery is in the past in America.
Everything considered I invested an hour or more in total. I am pretty sure decades of engineering time and resources were invested over the years because some people didn't like a default globally used for decades.
Master! Master!
...mehTo be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.
If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
and
from Latin: magister, "teacher"
teaching requires mastery, not leadership, although the concepts are related because mastery is also good for leadership.
my armchair etymology suggests that master and mastery were closely related until it started to be applied to leadership as well.
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...>
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.
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
But they don't.
At `$CLIENT` we use `stable` as the default branch.
Use whatever works for you. Getting upset about a default that you can change is like getting upset about the default wallpaper of your OS.
And before you get all persnickety about that argument working both ways: the developers of git, get to decide the defaults and they did.
If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right?
No idea how you got that impression from my comment. It sounds like you're the one that's upset.
I don't care what you name your branches. I do think it's dumb to tell other people what (not) to name their branch though. But definitely not something I feel compelled to rearrange my life over.
The people that wrote the software you're using for free, decided to change the default name.
That's it. Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
This is reductionist. The git people didn't pull this idea out of their butt. It came about because a lot of people were saying that we should not name our branches master.
I have no problem with what the git people did. Easy enough for them to change it, and it puts a dumb issue to bed (for them).
But I think it's fair for anyone to point out that the motivation was dumb, and to explain why it's dumb and how the word "master" is actually not an unreasonable choice in this context.
> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
Sure, until somebody makes the mistake of not renaming all of their old "master" branches and gets shamed by the word police over it.
Of course you're welcome to disagree.
It doesn't even make sense in this context though. The name just got copied from BitKeeper which had master and slave branches.
Git doesn't have that concept.
> Sure, until somebody makes the mistake of not renaming all of their old "master" branches and gets shamed by the word police over it.
How are you going to be shamed? I thought there's nothing wrong with it?
If you re-read my comments you will understand that I don't believe there's anything wrong with using the word "master" to name a branch. But other people do, which is why there was an uproar and the default name was ultimately changed to "main".
Not sure how you were able to misinterpret this.
If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, why would you care if someone else says "hey change this".
Do the same thing you'd do if someone says "hey you should use mongodb it's web scale": tell them you disagree and won't be doing that.
If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, how can you be "shamed" into doing something you disagree with?
I made a comment saying I disagree with the word police and I think it's dumb to cast people as being insensitive for using a longstanding word that makes sense to many people in the context it's used in.
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.
git config --global init.defaultBranch masterMost people do not care and will stick with the old default on old projects and use the new default on new projects. Occasionally, it stokes conversations around possible third options that are more descriptive like stable or development, but the norm is to just go with the default.
Going out of your way to set the default to the old name really reeks to me of slacktivism. People probably think that they're taking a stand, but in actual fact others will just assume that your repository is older or that you have an old configuration.
Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway
Glad it's going back to having a default and not asking.
[init]
defaultBranch = master
I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.
int main(int argc, char **argv);
Freestanding C gets rid of the libc so that's not a problem.
I submitted an issue to the GCC bugzilla about renaming certain symbols generated by compiler.
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113694
I don't know how to implement it and nobody else cared enough to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you have IDE0, primary, and IDE1, secondary. For the four devices a typical system would support, they would be referred to as primary master, primary slave, secondary master and secondary slave. This was extremely accepted terminology.
Newer machines and BIOSes could usually boot from any of these four devices but originally, many machines could only boot the primary master. That's why it's the master and the other one is the slave -- it is subservient in the sense that it can not be a boot drive and was usually used for secondary storage, not OS.
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...
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.
It applies equally to this than to systemd, wayland or Rust - but Rust is now trendy so people will bandwagon in their appreciation to look cool and in - to quote other topics regularly discussed on HN.
I fear that the most interesting thing about how these changes are received by the HN community is what it says about the HN community itself.
I personally found that additional detail to be very valuable, because it conveyed disdain without triggering justification for people like you to censor the comment completely.
It’s a rhetorical flourish pointing that in my opinion most people here are actually change averse, a trend which I personally notice more and more here.
I have no sensibilities. I am neither American nor interested in American politics. I am however deeply convinced that people having strong opinions about the names of branches have issues. An opinion I apply equally to people strongly advocating for the change and to people strongly against the change.
If this blocks you from "just want to do real work" maybe overthink your setup and adjust your pipelines?
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."
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
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.
That being said, this is a dumb reason to introduce inconsistency.
However, "man" originally means "people" as in "mankind", or "human". It's only recently (c 1400) that it replaced "wer" ("wif" being the feminine noun) as meaning males (or mid 20th century for becoming an exclamation).
I get to feel like a ninja when I commit, the conceptual meaning is close to that of the previous term, and there's no historical baggage related to the US. Win-win-win?
I do see what you're saying, though, and will admit to some cheekiness on my end.
I'll be keeping “master”, than you very much.
There are groups of black people that complained about the terminology, repeatedly [1]. So isn't it arrogant as a white dude to say, this thing hurts you, and we could easily change it, but fuck you we won't do it because we have always done it that other way?
Some easy no effort replacements:
- master-slave -> leader-follower
- blacklist -> denylist
- whitelist -> acceptlist
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_(technolo...
I stick with "master" in my Git repos partly because it's an excellent filter: it lets me steer well away from anyone who pitches a fit over the word.
Does it need to be said that if the US had or has a problem, it's they alone who need to deal with it? Since when did the rest of world took upon itself to "solve" their problem? Did we all get green card or something?
I don't feel like this will stop here. What's the next word some people in some other country decided to declare offensive?
Shame.
Git took the branch name from Bitkeeper which did have "slave" branches and used a "master/slave" analogy. Git didn't also inherit the "slave branch" concept in that same way, but it did have that heritage accidentally imported when git lazily reused that branch name.
> Does it need to be said that if the US had or has a problem, it's they alone who need to deal with it?
Slavery/indentured servitude is a worldwide problem that still exists today in countries that are not the US. Even if you think this is an over-correction in relationship to the historic US Slave Trade specifically, that was a multinational effort involving the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, and many other Former Colonies beyond just the US' involvement. The US took advantage of the trade, but it neither invented the trade nor was the lone slave owning country involved in that trade, nor was it the last country in that trading group to end slavery trading in practice even if it was one of the last ones on paper.
If we believe we should remove allusions to negative things why are we ok with "kill", "orphan", "evict", "bash", "cut", "isolate" etc? What is special about that terrible concept that we should stop using the word even when not applied to people at all?
That's what is "special" about it, that it wasn't special. It wasn't chosen. It was just a stupid inherited default that didn't make sense when questioned.
It was never an intentional allusion to a negative thing, it was accidentally a negative thing causing real people some harm, and it was easier to fix than to justify why it was a negative thing in the first place.
socalgal2•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
gritten•2mo ago
patates•2mo ago
boxed•2mo ago
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.
Y-bar•2mo ago
"Ände" is a slur? (excuse my lack of transductional skills)
optionalsquid•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
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.
dzhiurgis•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
johnisgood•2mo ago
optionalsquid•2mo ago
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...
johnisgood•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
I do not mind blocklistd, but then again, there was nothing wrong with blacklistd either.
ret2plt•2mo ago
rich_sasha•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
veeti•2mo ago
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/slavery-in-libya-li...
johnisgood•2mo ago
Please IT people, tell me that this thing is absurd.
veeti•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
rurp•2mo ago
mock-possum•2mo ago
ModernMech•2mo ago
johnisgood•2mo ago
jayd16•2mo ago
nazgul17•2mo ago
ecef9-8c0f-4374•2mo ago
mirekrusin•2mo ago
jauntywundrkind•2mo ago
bakugo•2mo ago
jauntywundrkind•2mo ago
Avoiding it should be easy. It should be the easiest of easy things. Make the change and move on. Hack your reality, improve things, don't make more of a glaring ugly mess of things than need be.
It costs so so little to do a small good act. You wouldn't name your primary branch holocaust or tyrant or oppressor or doommaker or worldruiner or hates[ethnicity]. But computing used master/slave extensively for decades (ex: I2C, IDE protocols). Folks arguing that it hurts their feelings to not have those names wouldn't be given any weight. These are alligator tears.
No one has made a case that "main" is a bad name. Because this isn't a real case. It's perfectly clear, no lesser a name in any way.
More broadly, when assessing positive liberty (freedom to do something) versus negative liberty (freedom from being dogged), we shouldn't favor positive liberty to make broadly harmful defaults that can hurt people and/or bring misery over negative liberty not have a world a rare couple antagonists insist on driving down in stature.
This feels to me like people either dragging their feet & bringing resistance, or, on many many cases, people actively obstructing, making an easy simple improvement much much more fraught & hard. And many of those people I feel like do it because they know it is a good change, and they actively seek to keep the world worse. I have little and descendingly less pity for any. If someone wants to build a case for why their feelings here that we shouldn't do this have weight, I'm all ears. And I'll spend some time to read more comments to see what I see. But the person I replied to made zero case for why they felt their emotional injury (as they begged for tolerance of intolerance), yet felt that their case should carry as much or more weight, where-as master/slave usage in computing are words which associates with slavery. Which is the ultimate positive liberty vs negative liberty case, which reflects the matter here: the negative liberty to not be enslaved outweighs any positive liberty to enslave.
You're free to think it's stupid!! That fact though just doesn't matter very much in this case. It doesn't actually really affect you. You can adapt, with barely more than zero cost. It's stupid maybe perhaps possibly!! But of no cost. And that's the weight of your feelings here: it's not actually of any consequence to you, you are claiming stake in a matter without any basis. You're free to feel however you like in this world, but whether those emotions actually match/reflect the circumstances that spring them matters. Generally I think most people kind of agree that it sucks that master/slave (ex: i2c, IDE protocols) nomenclature was chosen & used in computing, and calling the shift away stupid-in my view- should be taken as the smallest imaginable quantum of protest, the smallest tears imaginable. Stop stopping the world, let time progress forward, don't trap us in your negative energy forever.
bakugo•2mo ago
Naming a branch in my git repository "master" does not "hurt people". It does not "bring misery" unless you were already miserable and looking for things to justify it. This change is of consequence to me. It does affect me. "Barely more than zero cost" is more than zero cost. I don't care if you think my opinion "doesn't matter" or is "weightless", because yours doesn't matter any more than mine. You are not a higher being of superior importance because you chose to dedicate your life to fighting a never-ending war against the unreleting evil force that is a word on a screen. Your tears are the biggest, and most pathetic of all.
jauntywundrkind•2mo ago
> because your [opinion] doesn't matter any more than mine.
I wrote a wall of text because I actually care a tiny bit and have put work into explaining and backing my opinion & character. Because I think those opposed have a bar to meet, just as I want to clear a bar of respectability & engage duly on a topic that should be easy to improve on. What I see is you being quite aggressive & scathing while providing very scant little to argue your opinions.
You say our opinions are equally valid, but to me, opinions are weighed on argument, on what is said, and that's why I've tried to put my logic and character down here, to be honest & forthwith about what I'm saying: because that's the basis we have to use to assess opinions. This seems pretty agreeable to me, and again you have option to disagree, but I can't imagine doing so.
This is absolutely a question of weights. Making mountains out of mole-hills is to be avoided. The weight of this question is hardly worth considering at all, and it's absurd what tears you spill over doing such a simple improvement for the world. I'll also allow that perhaps the certainty & approach I've entered with has entrenched & only enhanced enmity to my cause. But with context, having seen master/slave used around in computing, and given how easy it is to shift & adapt to better, I continue to find opinions to the contrary to be unduly self-important, for no real reason. Why stand against such clear wins? My character may not be perfect for all, but let that not alone dissuade us.
cxr•2mo ago
It's a bad name and a bad change. I won't be using it. Not because "master" is good (I also won't be using "master"), but because "main" is bad—even worse than if they'd started referring to it in the documentation as the "default integration branch" and so named it "int".
I'd sooner support changing "master" to "margarita" than changing it to "main".
shadowgovt•2mo ago
(I've also seen `dev` used, short for 'development branch,' which seems pretty reasonable).
onion2k•2mo ago
We fix things that are broken. That's progress.
veeti•2mo ago
raincole•2mo ago
input_sh•2mo ago
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?
kmm•2mo ago
input_sh•2mo ago
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.
ret2plt•2mo ago
input_sh•2mo ago
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!
ret2plt•2mo ago
rawling•2mo ago
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?
Y-bar•2mo ago
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.
ret2plt•2mo ago
ret2plt•2mo ago
adastra22•2mo ago
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.
lp0_on_fire•2mo ago
“Well OBVIOUSLY”, says the white knight, “some people are too stupid to understand the context and nuance of a langue like mine English. We just HAVE to adjust it because they won’t understand.”
It says much more about the people pushing such things than it does about the perceived slight.
EnPissant•2mo ago
bigstrat2003•2mo ago
sam_lowry_•2mo ago
Sirikon•2mo ago
nomilk•2mo ago
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.
nsagent•2mo ago
JimDabell•2mo ago
> 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.
TrappedInCorner•2mo ago
stephen_g•2mo ago
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!
bakugo•2mo ago
If your definition of "people" is "armchair political activists with nothing better to do with their lives", then yes.
dmatech•2mo ago
stephen_g•2mo ago
7bit•2mo ago
croon•2mo ago
throw-the-towel•2mo ago
croon•2mo ago
nacozarina•2mo ago
binary132•2mo ago
SAI_Peregrinus•2mo ago
binary132•2mo ago
I was making a funny
hashar•2mo ago
« wïfmann », literally "female human", led to « wife ».
« were » means man and comes from Germanic and I don't think « weremann » has ever been a thing.
binary132•2mo ago
AdhemarVandamme•2mo ago
I find it interesting how the term shifted from a (mythical) temporal concept to a spatial concept, to now often a social concept (e.g. the Fourth World).
curtisblaine•2mo ago