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Long before this article appeared, I was already renaming ‘master’ to ‘default’. The term ‘master’ has always felt out of place and unnecessary to me. If anyth
by alwillis 6y ago
Long before this article appeared, I was already renaming ‘master’ to ‘default’. The term ‘master’ has always felt out of place and unnecessary to me.
If anything, the article affirms my gut feeling when I first started using version control back in the day. It didn't occur to me someone else might feel similarly.
When creating a new repo using Mercurial, the default branch is called default, which always made more sense to me.
Interestingly enough, both Mercurial and Git were created by Linux kernel hackers to handle the Linux kernel source code after the Linux project could no longer use Bitkeeper. They were released 12 days apart in April 2005.
Just pointing out that certain things, even seemingly small things, are often assumed to be okay. And especially in team settings, people don't always feel comfortable speaking up or being that person.
Reminds me of the aphorism: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
- Chyzwar 6y agoMaster and default have different meaning. Master in git mean master record for other branches. In mercurial default is more applicable because common workflow is not branch based but change set.
- alwillis 6y agoIt depends on the workflow. But Mercurial can be used just like Git when it comes to a branch-based workflow regardless of the underlying data model. It could be argued that by default, Mercurial discourages rewriting history unless you really want to and you know what you’re doing. So the definition of a ‘master’ branch is more applicable to Mercurial than it is to Git.
- alwillis 6y agoseeing all the pushback to the “rename the master branch” movement is disheartening. if renaming the branch makes even one current or future employee (or even an open source contributor feel more welcome!), why push back so hard on this? https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1271555823139876864?s=21 https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1271555823139876864?...
- Chyzwar 6y agoBecause not all uses of "master" have negative connotations. I can support renaming master-slave, but git is not such case. There is pushback because it creates massive amount of work for us without a good reason. All CI/CD pipelines, scripts, tools. Integration fixes, regressions and failed deployments because branch was main not master.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alwillis 6y agoBecause not all uses of "master" have negative connotations. I can support renaming master-slave, but git is not such case. Turns out that Git’s use of master decends from a use that is about master/slave: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
- Chyzwar 6y agoEvidence you use come from Gnome mailing list where Gnome maintainers where discussing unrelated issue.