13 ms·

GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

144 points by mindfreeze 6y ago

xixixao 6y ago
On the blacklist etc. issue, when you think about it it's actually the other way around. "black" was historically "bad" (not related to race), but it was super convenient that slaves had a darker skin that you could call "black", and things got blurred. No "white" people are actually white and no "black" people are actually black. "white" people are pinkish to light brownish and "black" people are light to dark brown. Of course it doesn't help that "dark" and "light" also have a value associated historically. This is a super unfortunate geo-graphical and historical coincidence that's gonna be hard to untangle (as in we probably can't disassociate the words from their pre-slavery historical meanings that are pretty universal, as in people are afraid when they can't see things -> night -> darkness -> black).
- xixixao 6y ago
  And on the original issue it's good to point out that there were millions of slaves throughout human history who were not black... That doesn't make the concept any better, but it hasn't been historically a racial issue (people were enslaved because of a difference in religion, place they lived in regardless of ethnicity or solely social status).
thefounder 6y ago
I guess now the whole master/slave tech should be renamed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)
- mavhc 6y ago
  Already has been, as the link shows. A pupil of mine was quite shocked to see an IDE cable labelled as such
- ColanR 6y ago
  I remember as a kid running into that terminology for the first time, as it related to HDDs connected to a motherboard. Didn't like it at first, still strikes me the wrong way, but does seem like the best terminology for the paradigm.
  - derefr 6y ago
    It’s a slightly wrong-headed connotation for drives, in that the metaphor just doesn’t fit well: something called a “slave” should probably be something unwilling, but forced by the master to obey; rather than something that follows the master willingly, or something that takes its cue as to its role from an external third party (i.e. you, the system integrator setting the DIP switches on the drives.) If you’re already willing to use metaphorical terms with unsettling connotations for things just because they’re fitting, then a more precise pair of terms for the setup on a drive cable would be “dominant” and “submissive”! (It’s not like we don’t already use “dominant” metaphorically in tons of dry ways, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory). We tend to avoid “submissive”, though, and that’s a shame; “voluntarily relinquishing control” is a very useful concept to get across in a single word.)
  - danharaj 6y ago
    Leader/Follower Coordinator/Worker Central/Auxiliary Conductor/Player We're making a metaphor here. There are many metaphors one could pick to describe a situation where one unit calls the shots and the others cooperate.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    primary/secondary and leader/follower make just as much sense, and avoid any discomfort. For IDE, not that it's around anymore, primary/secondary works perfectly. For electing something to control your distributed system "leader election" makes just as much sense as "master election". For git, "main" is 2 letters shorter than "master", and makes sense. All in all, this is good thing.
- quicklime 6y ago
  I'm a little confused about why GitHub is doing this. The master/slave thing I get - there's a direct link to actual slavery there, and it can be replaced with terms like leader/follower or primary/replica fairly easily. But the "master" branch in Git doesn't have a slave branch. It's a master from which copies are made (as in a "master recording"), which is a different sense of the word.
  - plorkyeran 6y ago
    Bitkeeper had master/slave repositories, and that's where git's use of the word master came from.
    - maushu 6y ago
      I'm going to need a source for that. I can't find any reference to slave in Bitkeeper documentation.
  - brenschluss 6y ago
    This tweet seems to have researched otherwise - that master/slave originated from bit keeper: https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21
    - mnm1 6y ago
      It's just somebody's opinion. "Probably" is the word that indicates that.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      I mean, even if it did originally, I doubt anyone that has worked with git in the past decade thought of a master/slave connection; it just doesn't make sense. I talked about this today with a black coworker (obviously doesn't represent the feelings of all black people etc), and he actually got quite angry about it - but he was angry at the idea of changing master to main, not the idea of keeping it! From his perspective, it's nothing more than virue signalling, a distraction from real issues. He also thought it risked ridicule, and that things like this risk turning people against real change. He did kind of see the point about the separate blacklist/whitelist debate though. Personally, instead of "master" I like the word "trunk", as I think it goes well with the branching concept.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Soon motherboard will be changed to parentboard; daughterboard to childboard.
- metrokoi 6y ago
  Slavery is a word for a concept, simply referencing it is not any more offensive than referencing killing. A the master/slave terminology in technology is not asserting that slavery is good, it is using the term to provide context. Perhaps we should rename "kill" to "terminate" as well, because black people experience killings by police and may see it as offensive? Killings by police seem to be more disturbing to black people at the current time than slavery, or more raw at least. Even "terminate" may still be seen as offensive. One might argue that slavery is more racially charged, but it's not any more than killing is. Millions of non-blacks were slaves across almost every single culture. If you look up news results for "killing" almost every single article is a bout a black killed by police, similar to how "slavery" would return news results almost entirely consisting of references to black slavery. If the meaning of words are fluid and more impactful to some than others, then "killing" and "slavery" are equally racially charged.
mirthflat83 6y ago
> but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list." Seriously?
- mavhc 6y ago
  Makes sense, better wording and less racist.
  - mirthflat83 6y ago
    Nothing about those terms are racist. What’s next, renaming the color “black”?
    - Kiro 6y ago
      No, but I've heard a lot of people saying we should stop using "dark" and "black" in association with evil, e.g. black magic or dark thoughts. I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing to do.
      - drdeca 6y ago
        I would guess that such associations have long existed, including in places where most people have dark skin, and are not based in the idea of “race”.
    - moritonal 6y ago
      Maybe it's work thinking about why the term "black" denotes not being able to do something.
    - tchaffee 6y ago
      Using black to mean evil or bad in a modern workplace is a microagression and is racist. Microagressions are well studied and the evidence points to it resulting psychological damage [1] [2]. The term "blacklist" started more frequently occurring at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas. So even the historical context does not support that the term is completely lacking of racist motives. If you are going to dehumanize and enslave an entire continent, it would certainly help your cause if their skin color continues to be associated with "evil". Consider also that the Latin word "niger" had many of the same figurative senses ("gloomy; unlucky; bad, wicked, malicious") as black is often used to mean. We don't need to rename the color black. What we do need to do is to stop using it to mean "bad" or "evil" and using white to mean "good" when there are actually far better and clearer words. Denylist says exactly what it does. Blacklist far less so, unless we are happy with continuing to use the word "black" to mean "evil". I leave it up to the reader to decide how it might psychologically affect someone if their skin color also means evil, and they are reminded of this on a regular basis by words used at work. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691619827499?journalCode=ppsa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/
zabdmyP 6y ago
How many of these activists own a MasterCard? How many black people own one? Ironically, outside the US the "Black edition MasterCard" is the top offer (named so, because (surprise) the card is black).
- TrowthePlow 6y ago
  Isn't the American Express "Black" card the top of the heap too?
  - olivierva 6y ago
    Although the color of the card is black the official name is Centurion
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
how are we going to call the master branch in git?
- a-saleh 6y ago
  We call it `develop`.
- kaidon 6y ago
  'trunk' should be fine. It is what I use to refer to the main/master branch when speaking in SCM-agnostic terms.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  In git? Master. This is about Github.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- moosterv 6y ago
  main? trunk? origin? so many possibilities!
  - hawski 6y ago
    Origin already has a specific meaning in the git nomenclature.
bzb3 6y ago
When they ask you what virtue signalling is, show them this.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  For those not familiar with that term like me, Wikipedia: > "Virtue signalling" is a pejorative neologism for the conspicuous expression of moral values, when performed to make oneself look virtuous to others.
- there_the_and 6y ago
  It's not. This is more like a swear word. No one would expect that calling it the "fuck" branch would be OK. Just because more people are OK with "master" doesn't change the fact that it bothers other people who are just trying to code. This isn't hard to understand.
  - cs02rm0 6y ago
    Master isn't a swear word. This isn't hard to understand.
    - there_the_and 6y ago
      Obviously people feel otherwise, and it's changing regardless of whether you are able to understand or not.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Not a swear word, exactly, but some find it genuinely offensive.
  - rgoulter 6y ago
    Well, "git" is a swear word in British English. "a foolish or worthless person", per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git
    - 6y ago
overgard 6y ago
I know this is going to be a PC war, but, I'm curious how they technically intend to do this. Is "main" just going to be a visual alias on the site? If so that will be really confusing if the branch is still technically called "master" and needs to be referred to that way in the command line. If they intend to actually rename the branches I don't know how they can do that without breaking all sorts of scripts and build tools.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  They're presumably just changing the default name of the default branch for new repositories created via github.
- lukevp 6y ago
  Well git internally is a directed acyclic graph of filesystem changes, and branches are just tags on nodes. Master is just a convention-based name for the default branch when the repo is first created, but it could be called anything. The only way that scripts would break would be if they explicitly listed master, and that should be able to be changed (or git could fall back by reserving both master and main as meaning the "Default" branch and either branch name was interoperable in the command set). That would only break cases where users were also using "main" to mean something else.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  You'll have to use the whitewashed^Wcalcium-hydroxided PC version of git.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Branch names have no meaning on git. "master" is just the default name for the initial branch when you create a repository using "git create". Github just wants to change it to "main". It won't change existing repositories and you can rename it to anything you want afterwards, including "master".
  - g_b 6y ago
    Actually master is used as the default for submodules branch tracking [1]. I maintain a Git client application that deals with submodules & I have to take this use-case into account. GitHub must work with Git & make this a proper change if they want to do this. Change the submodules specification as well. [1] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules.txt-submoduleltnamegtbranch https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules...
derefr 6y ago
I always understood a VCS “master” branch to be in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing, which in turn is a use of a sense of the verb “to master” akin to “to master one’s courage”—not conveying dominance, but rather the reaching of an apex in skill. If you’re in the market for a replacement that keeps the metaphorical power, though, I might suggest having a “mother” branch. “Mother” functions similarly to “master” in language, forming compounds like “mother ship”, or “mother sauce”, with very similar connotations: being something from which other elements in the set descend/derive; and to which other elements in the set return for some kind of maintenance or synchronization.
- jacksnipe 6y ago
  It’s not. It comes from master/slave, and I’m desperately trying to find the mailing-list email where someone (I wanna say on a BSD mailing list, but it could be anything tbh) traces the etymology backwards through different VCS branches until we get to one where the concepts are clearly “master/slave”. If anybody has the link handy I’d really appreciate it.
  - prezjordan 6y ago
    https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/... via https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489
  - fhars 6y ago
    This mail discusses some of the origins https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/... It argues that git‘s master branch is most likely directly derived from the master and slave repository concept in bitkeeper.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  >in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing That analogy doesn't really make sense, because audio mastering is more like cutting a release branch. The way git uses it is more equivalent to "trunk" in SVN.
juanuys 6y ago
trunk, anyone?
runawaybottle 6y ago
Let’s figure out the whole AD and BC year thing while we’re at it.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  They've been effectively replaced in academic literature at least with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era)
OneGuy123 6y ago
As if blacks were the only people who were slaves. You think white people were never slaves? Jews? Arabs? Chinese?
- whb07 6y ago
  Indentured servants, serfs like those from Russia etc. The only society/culture to put an end to slavery has been the Western ideals.
  - danharaj 6y ago
    Slavery is still practiced in the United States.
    - cameronbrown 6y ago
      Where?
      - danharaj 6y ago
        > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
NobodyNada 6y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093
sand_castles 6y ago
Wait, git by default creates master branch. So if you push master to Github, how is this going to work ? Is it not better to make the changes to Git ? Ask Linus Torvald in Finland.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  That'd be a horrendous breaking change. I'm assuming github are just going to alias it in the UI. I'd hate to have used both a master and a main branch before this.
- mLAPa 6y ago
  If you push to master, you'll be put on a Microsoft blacklist. Oh, wait. This is Microsoft again trying to disrupt the OSS community even further.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Ask Linus, who is in Oregon
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Git isn’t a great role model, however. It still uses the “blame” terminology which ascribes a needlessly negative and confrontational tone whenever you need to tell someone how you discovered the author of a line of code from your team’s codebase. This kind of vocabulary debt is something we should be paying off more of, more regularly, since it’s just as important — arguably more important — than functionality.
doublesCs 6y ago
.
- haspoken 6y ago
  The text on this page shows as the color black.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
temporama1 6y ago
Good one. Nearly had me for a moment.
gdsdfe 6y ago
It's not the words that hurt us it's the meaning and weight that we give them ... at this rate, soon, we won't be able to say anything and the lack of communication will deepen the divide.
tawaymastergit 6y ago
You know there is all of this talk that if you can make just one more person not have to feel discomfort then all of this is all worth it. This stuff makes me extremely uncomfortable. I can't keep up with the way that these rules change, and it makes me fearful that I'm going to accidentally say the wrong thing and have my life ruined, despite what my intent might have been. It's gotten to the point where during this latest culture war flare up, I am avoiding going to work, my anxiety has increased to the point where I have to use xanax to manage it again, and my productivity has dropped off completely. I am terrified of saying the wrong thing, or meaning to say the right thing but saying it in the wrong way. I have done my normal "hacker" thing and tried to research as much into the grievances that people have so that I can understand them and help work towards change, but that has led me to finding out that some things are considered "hate facts" and you can be labeled a racist for even knowing that they are true. These things are effecting my relationships. I'm avoiding some of my friends because of this. I'm afraid to read anything about this for fear of not knowing which things are "hate facts" and which aren't. This is terrifying. The state of the world as it is right now is legitimately terrifying to me. I've worked my whole life against racism, against ever biasing myself in any way against people because of things that they can't change, and right now there are so many things, every day, telling me that I'm a monster because of who I am. I almost can't describe to you all how depressing this all is. I'm not a monster. I care about people a lot and I go out of my way as much as possible to help them when I can.
lucb1e 6y ago
Welcome to the discussion the Netherlands has been having about Black Pete the last few years. It won't be pretty and there's little you can say against someone who goes "[now that you mention it,] yeah, this is offensive and you know, back in middle school someone did call me black pete once!" so this might go down a similar way. I would think "but nobody was ever called 'master' or 'blacklist', that just doesn't work" but look at some of the comments here already. This is looking super polarized. And I'm not talking about the etymologist that brings to light the racial background of a word like blacklist, that's still stating facts even if it legitimizes the claim. Not sure I should be posting this comment anyhow but if you value your time you might want to just stay away from the discussion. There are no winners that I have found.
decafbad 6y ago
Sure, we should do nothing about modern slavery everywhere in the world. Responsible people would do right thing to stop using the name of it as a technical term.
waheoo 6y ago
How is master in terms of git racially charged? (The article doesnt explain) Its the master copy/record. Its not the same as like the db master slave which i totally think needs looking at.
- brenschluss 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21
  - tgv 6y ago
    First: that's just stringing assumptions together. But etymology doesn't matter. If it would, "negro" wouldn't be a word to avoid. Actual use would matter, but the context doesn't seem to warrant that.
    - brenschluss 6y ago
      Etymology matters if enough people think it matters. Language has meaning that is social, and if enough people dislike a meaning or see a word a different way, that word will change its meaning. So right now we are watching words change meaning.
      - aQHAKS 6y ago
        > So right now we are watching words change meaning. On the Internet, TV, News and in OSS projects where the main developers report to their new corporate masters, sorry, leaders. Meanwhile said leaders are laughing in their luxury locker rooms about useful idiots and are using the exact same terminologies as before with their old boys networks. Truth is too much for HN. Enjoy your fairy tales, gurus, social constructs, webshit apps and continue to live in a dream world constructed by others.
      - waheoo 6y ago
        One dude? on twitter is enough people to change the meaning of the word? And that has something to do with explaining the long string of assumptions that nobody is willing to address?
anjc 6y ago
I don't understand the racist connotations given that there are no "slave" branches. Every similar mention of "master" can't change. What words can better describe a master boot record, for example?
- eplanit 6y ago
  I guess remastering audio recordings and movies is out now, too.
- jb0x168 6y ago
  Primary? Initial? Root? (ok maybe not the last one, though the internal rhyme is nice).
eplanit 6y ago
Geez. Is the i2c standard going to have to change, too to satisfy the woke mob?
madmulita 6y ago
Great, so "main" now means "master"? So, what's the difference?
- jb0x168 6y ago
  Maybe direct that question to someone who's dealt with the effects of systemic racism their whole life, you might find the answer enlightening.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - orthecreedence 6y ago
    I'd direct the question instead to all the white people who have no idea what the black experience is yet seem to have no problem editing the language on PoC's behalf so they can feel like they're "doing something" while PoC's freedoms and lives are being eviscerated by our justice system.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  The difference is that one piece of progress has been made toward building an ecosystem of tooling that doesn’t pointlessly alienate people. Some day, the effects of small changes like this will add up to serve us well with supporting a broad variety of team members with whom we can work and learn from.
gotoeleven 6y ago
The word vinegar ends in a very racist sound. We should change its name to tangy spice water.
gonational 6y ago
Yet another reason to not use GitHub (aka Microsoft’s next “embrace, extend, extinguish” victim). I don’t support racism. I don’t support slavery. The prior two statements have nothing to do with the terminology that I use to make programs. These corporations’ attempts to fuck up our language shouldn’t be seen as anything philanthropic. They are virtue signaling at best and societal cancer at worst.
exabrial 6y ago
We could have a bunch of reform: from reducing the police force size and budget, to removing pointless offenses ("no victim no crime"), to reduce interaction with police, to eliminating all government programs so to eliminate financial dependency on the government (create a toehold for systemic racism)... Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nation and cure systematic racism. /s Point being: Everyone is more than willing to say they support change, nobody is willing to do anything difficult, so they put forward crap PR moves like this that are completely non-consequential.
- weeboid 6y ago
  Even incremental progress is progress. And sometimes, incremental progress can happen at such an obtuse angle that it becomes completely unmergeable back to `main`. But you can always point to the spirit of the branch.
  - cs02rm0 6y ago
    I'm not sure this is incremental progress. If we rename the branches beyond Github's UI lots of things will break. And will it really affect racist attitudes even marginally? I can't see it myself. In which case, rather than progress, it's a distraction from anything that otherwise could afford real progress.
    - exabrial 6y ago
      ^ exactly my point. It's a distraction.
  - finnthehuman 6y ago
    >Even incremental progress is progress. Is this progress, or the appearance of progress (aka masturbation)? This is Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that continuously lobbies the government on issues much less important to society than systemic inequality. They've decided the proper corporate action in the wake of new civil unrest over racism is to change a variable name in an esoteric professional tool. A tool used almost exclusively by people smart enough to recognize the lack of active malice in the current name. The proper response to Microsoft by anyone who cares about racism should be to recognize the insult to their intelligence.
CodeWriter23 6y ago
Well this seems like a satisfactory solution to police disproportionately killing black men. Yes, sarcasm. I actually think efforts like this distract from the core problem, of, certain cops practicing racial bias when escalating to lethal force.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Ah the war on words. Soon (or here already?) the way you speak will he uses to determine your tribal membership.
emiraga 6y ago
One day we might find historical record of a slave owner holding "main" as a title. Any terminology that implies hierarchy can be construed by social justice to represent a slavery reference. In reality, they should just drop this, or call the branch "non_feature", better yet "non_feature_not_that_there_is_anything_wrong_with_being_a_feature"
jancsika 6y ago
I'm surprised it wasn't called "main" given it was all C wizards who developed git in the first place.
- jb0x168 6y ago
  "Trunk" fits the branching metaphor better, but I think "main" will be easier to uptake (autocomplete, muscle memory, etc). I feel the same way about "denylist" versus "blocklist". "Denylist" is more precise, but I think "blocklist" would make for an easier transition.
Rochus 6y ago
"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." George Orwell, 1984
- Kye 6y ago
  If you think modifying language with the aim of including more kinds of thinking is the same as the aim of Newspeak, you need to re-read 1984. You missed something.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    You may assume that I read it thoroughly. The first time was in 1984. The more I read it, the more things I find that are already reality.
    - Kye 6y ago
      I hope you give the words of people proposing improvements to language as much consideration. They aren't all mindless screamers on Twitter or people looking to remove all character from communication.
      - Rochus 6y ago
        Is it possible that you have trouble with other opinions?
        Kye 6y ago
        Was the quote supposed to be an opinion? My opinion is that if you share someone else's thoughts in place of your own, then it's not your opinion. And Orwell is dead. I can't ask him what he thinks about this. edit for the non-insulting reply: I only flagged the low-effort non-contribution that started this thread and the insult below. Someone else is responsible for the rest. Your other comments, though not very substantial, are more of a downvote situation--which I can't do on replies--than a flag situation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
atarian 6y ago
Well on the bright side, "main" is shorter to type than "master".
- nodejsblogger7 6y ago
  I don't think my workflow will be too interrupted ma<tab>
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
This is messed up. So Microsoft is so confident enough of their dominance in the development ecosystem (with eating up companies like GitHub and NPM) that they think they can just change the default branch name? People looking at this from social justice are missing the point. Call me paranoid, but this may be the beginning of the infamous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... I have nothing against MS, I think it's evil to disrespect and undermine open standard for the sake of social justice politics.
rukittenme 6y ago
Times are weird. Can't wait until I get to "git diversify primary". Now that I think about it, "pushing" "changes" to its "origin" sounds a lot like a dog whistle to me... Kidding aside, I can understand why referring to something bad as "black" could bother some people. At the end of the day, I just want version control. I'll use whatever command I need to.
baryphonic 6y ago
I kind of understood when people didn't want to use "master-slave." I didn't agree with it, especially in the context of databases or other redundant distributed systems where the "slaves" really were required to follow all of the commands from the "master," and this relationship was better captured by this term than the bland "primary-secondary." (However, I actually prefer "primary and secondary" when talking about storage drives, since the "primary" drive is more like first among equals rather than something issuing commands.) But I could always understand it, given that "master-slave" has certain connotations. This from GitHub, however, makes no sense. The word "master" is overloaded. In the sense used in source control, the term has nothing to do with slavery or servitude; it simply is "an original from which copies can be made." In fact, in all of my 10 years of using git, I have yet to see a "slave" branch or anything implying servitude of any kind. And this is ignoring the fact that distributed source control is an inherently egalitarian and liberating proposition (centralized services like GitHub itself notwithstanding). And who will benefit from this? What person suffering from oppression is going to be helped by being spared from seeing the word "master" (even without a concomitant term suggesting servitude)? Count me out. I'll keep naming my default branch "master," because that's what it is: an original from which to make copies. EDIT: In fact, I'd go so far as to say this will only harm the people it's trying to help. How much documentation exists out in the wild referring to the "master" branch? Who is more likely to rely on cobbled together Internet documentation when learning something new and relatively complicated like Git: a person of color without much support or mentorship, or a person from overrepresented groups who can likely just find a friend to ask? How is a person without much of a support network and trying to get into tech going to react when she has read about "checkout master," only to get to GitHub and see only "main."
- Shish2k 6y ago
  > The word "master" is overloaded Overloading of words is no longer allowed. See also: people can’t refer to their non-binary gender as “NB” because that means "non-black” in the context of race; polyamarous people can’t refer to their relationship style as “poly” because that is stealing the word from the Polynesians; etc :P
nyKLYam 6y ago
Two Microsoft critical comments have been purged from the discussion.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
haunter 6y ago
git = "a foolish or worthless person" Wonder if some people want to push for a rename. I won't be surprised
bizquit 6y ago
Amazing how americans destroy themselves with self censorship. It is like watching a building on fire.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
noxer 6y ago
Alfred Pennyworth: Why bats, Main Wayne?
idiocratic 6y ago
I'm a very anti-racist and anti-fascist person. I'm in favour of removing slavers and white supremacists statues. But these silly debates in the tech world makes me cringe a little and I wish our community was different. Isn't it of little importance how a branch is named? Let's focus on politics, on inclusion, on essential debates that our societies need to improve and let's not waste our energies changing stupid little things that have no meaning other than to a minority of rich white males from Silicon Valley, as a method to self-redemption. Like giving some money to charities and be done with it, instead of rolling up our sleeves and do some direct work. Very White, American, Protestant thing to do. And very easy. And it's also free marketing, the cynic in me thinks.
- villasv 6y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. You can worry about politics and other "essential" debates, and still worry about language and better defaults. It's low-gain/low-effort, but that's not really a reason to object.
- jb0x168 6y ago
  Just curious: are you also a member of one of the groups impacted by these terms?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway1997 6y ago
    Are you?
  - jasonlfunk 6y ago
    Why would that matter?
ykevinator 6y ago
Flagged?
- Rochus 6y ago
  Unfortunately there are people who misuse the "flagged" feature to suppress what they consider to be unpleasant opinions.
villasv 6y ago
This is such a low impact and harmless change. Even if someone is not to agree with it, why be against it? It's not like a small team inside GitHub is going to deplete the world's activism budget and this will hinder the advance of other definitely more important changes. I'm sure they will find a way to offer minimal impacts, specially because it's just a default value that can be easily configured.
- moosterv 6y ago
  That's my thought as well. I'm willing to change the terms I use if it makes this industry even a little bit more inclusive.
mnm1 6y ago
It seems to me that black people are asking to not be killed for no reason, to not be treated like second class citizens, to have equal rights not just in law but it reality. In the meantime, white people respond by changing the master branch name. Yeah, they got the message alright. This is going to make black lives matter. Changing words completely unrelated to the oppression of black people is somehow going to help. Or this is just a PR move like most responses, designed to placate and pretend to support the cause without actually doing so.
anaphor 6y ago
I don't think "main" is a good replacement because it loses the notion of it being a branch where the finalized and production ready code goes. It could just as easily mean "where we do all the work" (i.e. trunk based development, which I also dislike the name of), and I think that's potentially confusing to new people even more than "master" (although not as offensive to some people apparently). If I'm going to rename my default branch, it'll likely be "release" or "final" or something.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  I just use "trunk" as my root branch. I remain astounded that nobody seems to want to use this, when there's already existing architectural practices surrounding it.
  - orthecreedence 6y ago
    Has anybody thought about how "trunk" might make elephant coders feel?
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Master doesn’t necessarily imply “production,” either, though. It could be that master is where the latest work is, but “prod” is where production ready code should be merged into. All of these branch names’ meanings are arbitrary.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
From a purely technical standpoint, maim is a way better fucking name than master. Why should I put up with a technically inferior solution just to accommodate their backwards opinion? Just a lot of bitching and moaning. Why are y’all so offended? What we call things matter, read Wittgenstein Anyone who is bitching about this doesn’t do shit to help With race relations in real life so why do people here give their opinion so much credence, besides this being a WASP nest
Seb-C 6y ago
This is getting ridiculous and annoying. When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years. American people are projecting their very own and specific segregation problems onto the whole world by banning words universally useful. Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works. If you cannot say the words "slave" and "master", you cannot have a discussion about it, its history and influences on our society and on real people, because otherwise you would be deemed racist. In my country it became racist and implicitly forbidden to say "black people" or "arab people" because otherwise you are instantly deemed to be racist. So now we cannot talk at all about this topic. Politicians certainly won't risk their career by talking about it. So nothing changes, and nothing can actually improve (including the lives or people living today), because we cannot talk about it... I will continue to use words however I want.
- eeh 6y ago
  > When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years. Yes, slavery has been around for a long time in many countries, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve our terminology. > Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works. This vocabulary hasn't been forbidden. The word is still used, it's just not used re Github. That said, I consider Github's proposed change to be virtue signaling. Was anybody actually upset at this, or are changes being made just because they can be? Update: Let me know who disagrees with what. I've disagreed with points made on both sides, so maybe that guarantees ire?
  - cosmiccatnap 6y ago
    I think you are missing a vital point though. In computer science these relationships ARE master and slave by definition. One is an all beholden slave to a all powerful master and that's ok because it's a computer and it doesn't have feelings like that. If it's referencing anything it's simply a clever way to process an analogy for what it's doing. To think that this is where we need to focus our time is a bit silly when you could be out in the streets. To me it feels like GitHub wants to have the illusion of being progressive while changing something that nobody considered even remotely offensive literally 24h ago
quattrofan 6y ago
Ridiculous. What exactly is this going to achieve? It's not like using the words with this meaning "celebrate" racism. For those like me who are liberals I can tell you this crap will guarantee populists like Trump continue to get into power.
qqj 6y ago
companies like github should remain apolitical. this is pure nonesense, merely a show of force by otherwise impotent and misguided liberals. take your outrage somewhere else.
circular_logic 6y ago
Git being a cli and "main" being shorter to type might help motivate those that are not convinced by the histoial arguments.

144 points by mindfreeze 6y ago

On the blacklist etc. issue, when you think about it it's actually the other way around. "black" was historically "bad" (not related to race), but it was super convenient that slaves had a darker skin that you could call "black", and things got blurred. No "white" people are actually white and no "black" people are actually black. "white" people are pinkish to light brownish and "black" people are light to dark brown. Of course it doesn't help that "dark" and "light" also have a value associated historically. This is a super unfortunate geo-graphical and historical coincidence that's gonna be hard to untangle (as in we probably can't disassociate the words from their pre-slavery historical meanings that are pretty universal, as in people are afraid when they can't see things -> night -> darkness -> black).

xixixao 6y ago
And on the original issue it's good to point out that there were millions of slaves throughout human history who were not black... That doesn't make the concept any better, but it hasn't been historically a racial issue (people were enslaved because of a difference in religion, place they lived in regardless of ethnicity or solely social status).

thefounder 6y ago

I guess now the whole master/slave tech should be renamed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)

mavhc 6y ago
Already has been, as the link shows. A pupil of mine was quite shocked to see an IDE cable labelled as such
ColanR 6y ago
I remember as a kid running into that terminology for the first time, as it related to HDDs connected to a motherboard. Didn't like it at first, still strikes me the wrong way, but does seem like the best terminology for the paradigm.
- derefr 6y ago
  It’s a slightly wrong-headed connotation for drives, in that the metaphor just doesn’t fit well: something called a “slave” should probably be something unwilling, but forced by the master to obey; rather than something that follows the master willingly, or something that takes its cue as to its role from an external third party (i.e. you, the system integrator setting the DIP switches on the drives.) If you’re already willing to use metaphorical terms with unsettling connotations for things just because they’re fitting, then a more precise pair of terms for the setup on a drive cable would be “dominant” and “submissive”! (It’s not like we don’t already use “dominant” metaphorically in tons of dry ways, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory). We tend to avoid “submissive”, though, and that’s a shame; “voluntarily relinquishing control” is a very useful concept to get across in a single word.)
- danharaj 6y ago
  Leader/Follower Coordinator/Worker Central/Auxiliary Conductor/Player We're making a metaphor here. There are many metaphors one could pick to describe a situation where one unit calls the shots and the others cooperate.
- jrockway 6y ago
  primary/secondary and leader/follower make just as much sense, and avoid any discomfort. For IDE, not that it's around anymore, primary/secondary works perfectly. For electing something to control your distributed system "leader election" makes just as much sense as "master election". For git, "main" is 2 letters shorter than "master", and makes sense. All in all, this is good thing.
quicklime 6y ago
I'm a little confused about why GitHub is doing this. The master/slave thing I get - there's a direct link to actual slavery there, and it can be replaced with terms like leader/follower or primary/replica fairly easily. But the "master" branch in Git doesn't have a slave branch. It's a master from which copies are made (as in a "master recording"), which is a different sense of the word.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  Bitkeeper had master/slave repositories, and that's where git's use of the word master came from.
  - maushu 6y ago
    I'm going to need a source for that. I can't find any reference to slave in Bitkeeper documentation.
- brenschluss 6y ago
  This tweet seems to have researched otherwise - that master/slave originated from bit keeper: https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21
  - mnm1 6y ago
    It's just somebody's opinion. "Probably" is the word that indicates that.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I mean, even if it did originally, I doubt anyone that has worked with git in the past decade thought of a master/slave connection; it just doesn't make sense. I talked about this today with a black coworker (obviously doesn't represent the feelings of all black people etc), and he actually got quite angry about it - but he was angry at the idea of changing master to main, not the idea of keeping it! From his perspective, it's nothing more than virue signalling, a distraction from real issues. He also thought it risked ridicule, and that things like this risk turning people against real change. He did kind of see the point about the separate blacklist/whitelist debate though. Personally, instead of "master" I like the word "trunk", as I think it goes well with the branching concept.
catalogia 6y ago
Soon motherboard will be changed to parentboard; daughterboard to childboard.
metrokoi 6y ago
Slavery is a word for a concept, simply referencing it is not any more offensive than referencing killing. A the master/slave terminology in technology is not asserting that slavery is good, it is using the term to provide context. Perhaps we should rename "kill" to "terminate" as well, because black people experience killings by police and may see it as offensive? Killings by police seem to be more disturbing to black people at the current time than slavery, or more raw at least. Even "terminate" may still be seen as offensive. One might argue that slavery is more racially charged, but it's not any more than killing is. Millions of non-blacks were slaves across almost every single culture. If you look up news results for "killing" almost every single article is a bout a black killed by police, similar to how "slavery" would return news results almost entirely consisting of references to black slavery. If the meaning of words are fluid and more impactful to some than others, then "killing" and "slavery" are equally racially charged.

mirthflat83 6y ago

> but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list." Seriously?

mavhc 6y ago
Makes sense, better wording and less racist.
- mirthflat83 6y ago
  Nothing about those terms are racist. What’s next, renaming the color “black”?
  - Kiro 6y ago
    No, but I've heard a lot of people saying we should stop using "dark" and "black" in association with evil, e.g. black magic or dark thoughts. I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing to do.
    - drdeca 6y ago
      I would guess that such associations have long existed, including in places where most people have dark skin, and are not based in the idea of “race”.
  - moritonal 6y ago
    Maybe it's work thinking about why the term "black" denotes not being able to do something.
  - tchaffee 6y ago
    Using black to mean evil or bad in a modern workplace is a microagression and is racist. Microagressions are well studied and the evidence points to it resulting psychological damage [1] [2]. The term "blacklist" started more frequently occurring at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas. So even the historical context does not support that the term is completely lacking of racist motives. If you are going to dehumanize and enslave an entire continent, it would certainly help your cause if their skin color continues to be associated with "evil". Consider also that the Latin word "niger" had many of the same figurative senses ("gloomy; unlucky; bad, wicked, malicious") as black is often used to mean. We don't need to rename the color black. What we do need to do is to stop using it to mean "bad" or "evil" and using white to mean "good" when there are actually far better and clearer words. Denylist says exactly what it does. Blacklist far less so, unless we are happy with continuing to use the word "black" to mean "evil". I leave it up to the reader to decide how it might psychologically affect someone if their skin color also means evil, and they are reminded of this on a regular basis by words used at work. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691619827499?journalCode=ppsa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

zabdmyP 6y ago

How many of these activists own a MasterCard? How many black people own one? Ironically, outside the US the "Black edition MasterCard" is the top offer (named so, because (surprise) the card is black).

TrowthePlow 6y ago
Isn't the American Express "Black" card the top of the heap too?
- olivierva 6y ago
  Although the color of the card is black the official name is Centurion

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

how are we going to call the master branch in git?

a-saleh 6y ago
We call it `develop`.
kaidon 6y ago
'trunk' should be fine. It is what I use to refer to the main/master branch when speaking in SCM-agnostic terms.
cs02rm0 6y ago
In git? Master. This is about Github.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
moosterv 6y ago
main? trunk? origin? so many possibilities!
- hawski 6y ago
  Origin already has a specific meaning in the git nomenclature.

bzb3 6y ago

When they ask you what virtue signalling is, show them this.

lucb1e 6y ago
For those not familiar with that term like me, Wikipedia: > "Virtue signalling" is a pejorative neologism for the conspicuous expression of moral values, when performed to make oneself look virtuous to others.
there_the_and 6y ago
It's not. This is more like a swear word. No one would expect that calling it the "fuck" branch would be OK. Just because more people are OK with "master" doesn't change the fact that it bothers other people who are just trying to code. This isn't hard to understand.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  Master isn't a swear word. This isn't hard to understand.
  - there_the_and 6y ago
    Obviously people feel otherwise, and it's changing regardless of whether you are able to understand or not.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Not a swear word, exactly, but some find it genuinely offensive.
- rgoulter 6y ago
  Well, "git" is a swear word in British English. "a foolish or worthless person", per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git
  - 6y ago

overgard 6y ago

I know this is going to be a PC war, but, I'm curious how they technically intend to do this. Is "main" just going to be a visual alias on the site? If so that will be really confusing if the branch is still technically called "master" and needs to be referred to that way in the command line. If they intend to actually rename the branches I don't know how they can do that without breaking all sorts of scripts and build tools.

plorkyeran 6y ago
They're presumably just changing the default name of the default branch for new repositories created via github.
lukevp 6y ago
Well git internally is a directed acyclic graph of filesystem changes, and branches are just tags on nodes. Master is just a convention-based name for the default branch when the repo is first created, but it could be called anything. The only way that scripts would break would be if they explicitly listed master, and that should be able to be changed (or git could fall back by reserving both master and main as meaning the "Default" branch and either branch name was interoperable in the command set). That would only break cases where users were also using "main" to mean something else.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
You'll have to use the whitewashed^Wcalcium-hydroxided PC version of git.
GuB-42 6y ago
Branch names have no meaning on git. "master" is just the default name for the initial branch when you create a repository using "git create". Github just wants to change it to "main". It won't change existing repositories and you can rename it to anything you want afterwards, including "master".
- g_b 6y ago
  Actually master is used as the default for submodules branch tracking [1]. I maintain a Git client application that deals with submodules & I have to take this use-case into account. GitHub must work with Git & make this a proper change if they want to do this. Change the submodules specification as well. [1] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules.txt-submoduleltnamegtbranch https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules...

derefr 6y ago

I always understood a VCS “master” branch to be in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing, which in turn is a use of a sense of the verb “to master” akin to “to master one’s courage”—not conveying dominance, but rather the reaching of an apex in skill. If you’re in the market for a replacement that keeps the metaphorical power, though, I might suggest having a “mother” branch. “Mother” functions similarly to “master” in language, forming compounds like “mother ship”, or “mother sauce”, with very similar connotations: being something from which other elements in the set descend/derive; and to which other elements in the set return for some kind of maintenance or synchronization.

jacksnipe 6y ago
It’s not. It comes from master/slave, and I’m desperately trying to find the mailing-list email where someone (I wanna say on a BSD mailing list, but it could be anything tbh) traces the etymology backwards through different VCS branches until we get to one where the concepts are clearly “master/slave”. If anybody has the link handy I’d really appreciate it.
- prezjordan 6y ago
  https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/... via https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489
- fhars 6y ago
  This mail discusses some of the origins https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/... It argues that git‘s master branch is most likely directly derived from the master and slave repository concept in bitkeeper.
cycloptic 6y ago
>in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing That analogy doesn't really make sense, because audio mastering is more like cutting a release branch. The way git uses it is more equivalent to "trunk" in SVN.

juanuys 6y ago

trunk, anyone?

runawaybottle 6y ago

Let’s figure out the whole AD and BC year thing while we’re at it.

thinkharderdev 6y ago
They've been effectively replaced in academic literature at least with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era)

OneGuy123 6y ago

As if blacks were the only people who were slaves. You think white people were never slaves? Jews? Arabs? Chinese?

whb07 6y ago
Indentured servants, serfs like those from Russia etc. The only society/culture to put an end to slavery has been the Western ideals.
- danharaj 6y ago
  Slavery is still practiced in the United States.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Where?
    - danharaj 6y ago
      > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

NobodyNada 6y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093

sand_castles 6y ago

Wait, git by default creates master branch. So if you push master to Github, how is this going to work ? Is it not better to make the changes to Git ? Ask Linus Torvald in Finland.

cs02rm0 6y ago
That'd be a horrendous breaking change. I'm assuming github are just going to alias it in the UI. I'd hate to have used both a master and a main branch before this.
mLAPa 6y ago
If you push to master, you'll be put on a Microsoft blacklist. Oh, wait. This is Microsoft again trying to disrupt the OSS community even further.
kzrdude 6y ago
Ask Linus, who is in Oregon
ironmagma 6y ago
Git isn’t a great role model, however. It still uses the “blame” terminology which ascribes a needlessly negative and confrontational tone whenever you need to tell someone how you discovered the author of a line of code from your team’s codebase. This kind of vocabulary debt is something we should be paying off more of, more regularly, since it’s just as important — arguably more important — than functionality.

doublesCs 6y ago

haspoken 6y ago
The text on this page shows as the color black.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

temporama1 6y ago

Good one. Nearly had me for a moment.

gdsdfe 6y ago

It's not the words that hurt us it's the meaning and weight that we give them ... at this rate, soon, we won't be able to say anything and the lack of communication will deepen the divide.

tawaymastergit 6y ago

You know there is all of this talk that if you can make just one more person not have to feel discomfort then all of this is all worth it. This stuff makes me extremely uncomfortable. I can't keep up with the way that these rules change, and it makes me fearful that I'm going to accidentally say the wrong thing and have my life ruined, despite what my intent might have been. It's gotten to the point where during this latest culture war flare up, I am avoiding going to work, my anxiety has increased to the point where I have to use xanax to manage it again, and my productivity has dropped off completely. I am terrified of saying the wrong thing, or meaning to say the right thing but saying it in the wrong way. I have done my normal "hacker" thing and tried to research as much into the grievances that people have so that I can understand them and help work towards change, but that has led me to finding out that some things are considered "hate facts" and you can be labeled a racist for even knowing that they are true. These things are effecting my relationships. I'm avoiding some of my friends because of this. I'm afraid to read anything about this for fear of not knowing which things are "hate facts" and which aren't. This is terrifying. The state of the world as it is right now is legitimately terrifying to me. I've worked my whole life against racism, against ever biasing myself in any way against people because of things that they can't change, and right now there are so many things, every day, telling me that I'm a monster because of who I am. I almost can't describe to you all how depressing this all is. I'm not a monster. I care about people a lot and I go out of my way as much as possible to help them when I can.

lucb1e 6y ago

Welcome to the discussion the Netherlands has been having about Black Pete the last few years. It won't be pretty and there's little you can say against someone who goes "[now that you mention it,] yeah, this is offensive and you know, back in middle school someone did call me black pete once!" so this might go down a similar way. I would think "but nobody was ever called 'master' or 'blacklist', that just doesn't work" but look at some of the comments here already. This is looking super polarized. And I'm not talking about the etymologist that brings to light the racial background of a word like blacklist, that's still stating facts even if it legitimizes the claim. Not sure I should be posting this comment anyhow but if you value your time you might want to just stay away from the discussion. There are no winners that I have found.

decafbad 6y ago

Sure, we should do nothing about modern slavery everywhere in the world. Responsible people would do right thing to stop using the name of it as a technical term.

waheoo 6y ago

How is master in terms of git racially charged? (The article doesnt explain) Its the master copy/record. Its not the same as like the db master slave which i totally think needs looking at.

brenschluss 6y ago
https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21 https://twitter.com/tobie/status/1270290278029631489?s=21
- tgv 6y ago
  First: that's just stringing assumptions together. But etymology doesn't matter. If it would, "negro" wouldn't be a word to avoid. Actual use would matter, but the context doesn't seem to warrant that.
  - brenschluss 6y ago
    Etymology matters if enough people think it matters. Language has meaning that is social, and if enough people dislike a meaning or see a word a different way, that word will change its meaning. So right now we are watching words change meaning.
    - aQHAKS 6y ago
      > So right now we are watching words change meaning. On the Internet, TV, News and in OSS projects where the main developers report to their new corporate masters, sorry, leaders. Meanwhile said leaders are laughing in their luxury locker rooms about useful idiots and are using the exact same terminologies as before with their old boys networks. Truth is too much for HN. Enjoy your fairy tales, gurus, social constructs, webshit apps and continue to live in a dream world constructed by others.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      One dude? on twitter is enough people to change the meaning of the word? And that has something to do with explaining the long string of assumptions that nobody is willing to address?

anjc 6y ago

I don't understand the racist connotations given that there are no "slave" branches. Every similar mention of "master" can't change. What words can better describe a master boot record, for example?

eplanit 6y ago
I guess remastering audio recordings and movies is out now, too.
jb0x168 6y ago
Primary? Initial? Root? (ok maybe not the last one, though the internal rhyme is nice).

eplanit 6y ago

Geez. Is the i2c standard going to have to change, too to satisfy the woke mob?

madmulita 6y ago

Great, so "main" now means "master"? So, what's the difference?

jb0x168 6y ago
Maybe direct that question to someone who's dealt with the effects of systemic racism their whole life, you might find the answer enlightening.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  I'd direct the question instead to all the white people who have no idea what the black experience is yet seem to have no problem editing the language on PoC's behalf so they can feel like they're "doing something" while PoC's freedoms and lives are being eviscerated by our justice system.
ironmagma 6y ago
The difference is that one piece of progress has been made toward building an ecosystem of tooling that doesn’t pointlessly alienate people. Some day, the effects of small changes like this will add up to serve us well with supporting a broad variety of team members with whom we can work and learn from.

gotoeleven 6y ago

The word vinegar ends in a very racist sound. We should change its name to tangy spice water.

gonational 6y ago

Yet another reason to not use GitHub (aka Microsoft’s next “embrace, extend, extinguish” victim). I don’t support racism. I don’t support slavery. The prior two statements have nothing to do with the terminology that I use to make programs. These corporations’ attempts to fuck up our language shouldn’t be seen as anything philanthropic. They are virtue signaling at best and societal cancer at worst.

exabrial 6y ago

We could have a bunch of reform: from reducing the police force size and budget, to removing pointless offenses ("no victim no crime"), to reduce interaction with police, to eliminating all government programs so to eliminate financial dependency on the government (create a toehold for systemic racism)... Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nation and cure systematic racism. /s Point being: Everyone is more than willing to say they support change, nobody is willing to do anything difficult, so they put forward crap PR moves like this that are completely non-consequential.

weeboid 6y ago
Even incremental progress is progress. And sometimes, incremental progress can happen at such an obtuse angle that it becomes completely unmergeable back to `main`. But you can always point to the spirit of the branch.
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is incremental progress. If we rename the branches beyond Github's UI lots of things will break. And will it really affect racist attitudes even marginally? I can't see it myself. In which case, rather than progress, it's a distraction from anything that otherwise could afford real progress.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    ^ exactly my point. It's a distraction.
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >Even incremental progress is progress. Is this progress, or the appearance of progress (aka masturbation)? This is Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that continuously lobbies the government on issues much less important to society than systemic inequality. They've decided the proper corporate action in the wake of new civil unrest over racism is to change a variable name in an esoteric professional tool. A tool used almost exclusively by people smart enough to recognize the lack of active malice in the current name. The proper response to Microsoft by anyone who cares about racism should be to recognize the insult to their intelligence.

CodeWriter23 6y ago

Well this seems like a satisfactory solution to police disproportionately killing black men. Yes, sarcasm. I actually think efforts like this distract from the core problem, of, certain cops practicing racial bias when escalating to lethal force.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Ah the war on words. Soon (or here already?) the way you speak will he uses to determine your tribal membership.

emiraga 6y ago

One day we might find historical record of a slave owner holding "main" as a title. Any terminology that implies hierarchy can be construed by social justice to represent a slavery reference. In reality, they should just drop this, or call the branch "non_feature", better yet "non_feature_not_that_there_is_anything_wrong_with_being_a_feature"

jancsika 6y ago

I'm surprised it wasn't called "main" given it was all C wizards who developed git in the first place.

jb0x168 6y ago
"Trunk" fits the branching metaphor better, but I think "main" will be easier to uptake (autocomplete, muscle memory, etc). I feel the same way about "denylist" versus "blocklist". "Denylist" is more precise, but I think "blocklist" would make for an easier transition.

Rochus 6y ago

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." George Orwell, 1984

Kye 6y ago
If you think modifying language with the aim of including more kinds of thinking is the same as the aim of Newspeak, you need to re-read 1984. You missed something.
- Rochus 6y ago
  You may assume that I read it thoroughly. The first time was in 1984. The more I read it, the more things I find that are already reality.
  - Kye 6y ago
    I hope you give the words of people proposing improvements to language as much consideration. They aren't all mindless screamers on Twitter or people looking to remove all character from communication.
    - Rochus 6y ago
      Is it possible that you have trouble with other opinions?
      - Kye 6y ago
        Was the quote supposed to be an opinion? My opinion is that if you share someone else's thoughts in place of your own, then it's not your opinion. And Orwell is dead. I can't ask him what he thinks about this. edit for the non-insulting reply: I only flagged the low-effort non-contribution that started this thread and the insult below. Someone else is responsible for the rest. Your other comments, though not very substantial, are more of a downvote situation--which I can't do on replies--than a flag situation.

deleted 6y ago

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atarian 6y ago

Well on the bright side, "main" is shorter to type than "master".

nodejsblogger7 6y ago
I don't think my workflow will be too interrupted ma<tab>

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago

This is messed up. So Microsoft is so confident enough of their dominance in the development ecosystem (with eating up companies like GitHub and NPM) that they think they can just change the default branch name? People looking at this from social justice are missing the point. Call me paranoid, but this may be the beginning of the infamous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... I have nothing against MS, I think it's evil to disrespect and undermine open standard for the sake of social justice politics.

rukittenme 6y ago

Times are weird. Can't wait until I get to "git diversify primary". Now that I think about it, "pushing" "changes" to its "origin" sounds a lot like a dog whistle to me... Kidding aside, I can understand why referring to something bad as "black" could bother some people. At the end of the day, I just want version control. I'll use whatever command I need to.

baryphonic 6y ago

I kind of understood when people didn't want to use "master-slave." I didn't agree with it, especially in the context of databases or other redundant distributed systems where the "slaves" really were required to follow all of the commands from the "master," and this relationship was better captured by this term than the bland "primary-secondary." (However, I actually prefer "primary and secondary" when talking about storage drives, since the "primary" drive is more like first among equals rather than something issuing commands.) But I could always understand it, given that "master-slave" has certain connotations. This from GitHub, however, makes no sense. The word "master" is overloaded. In the sense used in source control, the term has nothing to do with slavery or servitude; it simply is "an original from which copies can be made." In fact, in all of my 10 years of using git, I have yet to see a "slave" branch or anything implying servitude of any kind. And this is ignoring the fact that distributed source control is an inherently egalitarian and liberating proposition (centralized services like GitHub itself notwithstanding). And who will benefit from this? What person suffering from oppression is going to be helped by being spared from seeing the word "master" (even without a concomitant term suggesting servitude)? Count me out. I'll keep naming my default branch "master," because that's what it is: an original from which to make copies. EDIT: In fact, I'd go so far as to say this will only harm the people it's trying to help. How much documentation exists out in the wild referring to the "master" branch? Who is more likely to rely on cobbled together Internet documentation when learning something new and relatively complicated like Git: a person of color without much support or mentorship, or a person from overrepresented groups who can likely just find a friend to ask? How is a person without much of a support network and trying to get into tech going to react when she has read about "checkout master," only to get to GitHub and see only "main."

Shish2k 6y ago
> The word "master" is overloaded Overloading of words is no longer allowed. See also: people can’t refer to their non-binary gender as “NB” because that means "non-black” in the context of race; polyamarous people can’t refer to their relationship style as “poly” because that is stealing the word from the Polynesians; etc :P

nyKLYam 6y ago

Two Microsoft critical comments have been purged from the discussion.

deleted 6y ago
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haunter 6y ago

git = "a foolish or worthless person" Wonder if some people want to push for a rename. I won't be surprised

bizquit 6y ago

Amazing how americans destroy themselves with self censorship. It is like watching a building on fire.

deleted 6y ago

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noxer 6y ago

Alfred Pennyworth: Why bats, Main Wayne?

idiocratic 6y ago

I'm a very anti-racist and anti-fascist person. I'm in favour of removing slavers and white supremacists statues. But these silly debates in the tech world makes me cringe a little and I wish our community was different. Isn't it of little importance how a branch is named? Let's focus on politics, on inclusion, on essential debates that our societies need to improve and let's not waste our energies changing stupid little things that have no meaning other than to a minority of rich white males from Silicon Valley, as a method to self-redemption. Like giving some money to charities and be done with it, instead of rolling up our sleeves and do some direct work. Very White, American, Protestant thing to do. And very easy. And it's also free marketing, the cynic in me thinks.

villasv 6y ago
That's a false dichotomy. You can worry about politics and other "essential" debates, and still worry about language and better defaults. It's low-gain/low-effort, but that's not really a reason to object.
jb0x168 6y ago
Just curious: are you also a member of one of the groups impacted by these terms?
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- throwaway1997 6y ago
  Are you?
- jasonlfunk 6y ago
  Why would that matter?

ykevinator 6y ago

Flagged?

Rochus 6y ago
Unfortunately there are people who misuse the "flagged" feature to suppress what they consider to be unpleasant opinions.

villasv 6y ago

This is such a low impact and harmless change. Even if someone is not to agree with it, why be against it? It's not like a small team inside GitHub is going to deplete the world's activism budget and this will hinder the advance of other definitely more important changes. I'm sure they will find a way to offer minimal impacts, specially because it's just a default value that can be easily configured.

moosterv 6y ago
That's my thought as well. I'm willing to change the terms I use if it makes this industry even a little bit more inclusive.

mnm1 6y ago

It seems to me that black people are asking to not be killed for no reason, to not be treated like second class citizens, to have equal rights not just in law but it reality. In the meantime, white people respond by changing the master branch name. Yeah, they got the message alright. This is going to make black lives matter. Changing words completely unrelated to the oppression of black people is somehow going to help. Or this is just a PR move like most responses, designed to placate and pretend to support the cause without actually doing so.

anaphor 6y ago

I don't think "main" is a good replacement because it loses the notion of it being a branch where the finalized and production ready code goes. It could just as easily mean "where we do all the work" (i.e. trunk based development, which I also dislike the name of), and I think that's potentially confusing to new people even more than "master" (although not as offensive to some people apparently). If I'm going to rename my default branch, it'll likely be "release" or "final" or something.

Klonoar 6y ago
I just use "trunk" as my root branch. I remain astounded that nobody seems to want to use this, when there's already existing architectural practices surrounding it.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Has anybody thought about how "trunk" might make elephant coders feel?
ironmagma 6y ago
Master doesn’t necessarily imply “production,” either, though. It could be that master is where the latest work is, but “prod” is where production ready code should be merged into. All of these branch names’ meanings are arbitrary.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

From a purely technical standpoint, maim is a way better fucking name than master. Why should I put up with a technically inferior solution just to accommodate their backwards opinion? Just a lot of bitching and moaning. Why are y’all so offended? What we call things matter, read Wittgenstein Anyone who is bitching about this doesn’t do shit to help With race relations in real life so why do people here give their opinion so much credence, besides this being a WASP nest

Seb-C 6y ago

This is getting ridiculous and annoying. When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years. American people are projecting their very own and specific segregation problems onto the whole world by banning words universally useful. Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works. If you cannot say the words "slave" and "master", you cannot have a discussion about it, its history and influences on our society and on real people, because otherwise you would be deemed racist. In my country it became racist and implicitly forbidden to say "black people" or "arab people" because otherwise you are instantly deemed to be racist. So now we cannot talk at all about this topic. Politicians certainly won't risk their career by talking about it. So nothing changes, and nothing can actually improve (including the lives or people living today), because we cannot talk about it... I will continue to use words however I want.

eeh 6y ago
> When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years. Yes, slavery has been around for a long time in many countries, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve our terminology. > Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works. This vocabulary hasn't been forbidden. The word is still used, it's just not used re Github. That said, I consider Github's proposed change to be virtue signaling. Was anybody actually upset at this, or are changes being made just because they can be? Update: Let me know who disagrees with what. I've disagreed with points made on both sides, so maybe that guarantees ire?
- cosmiccatnap 6y ago
  I think you are missing a vital point though. In computer science these relationships ARE master and slave by definition. One is an all beholden slave to a all powerful master and that's ok because it's a computer and it doesn't have feelings like that. If it's referencing anything it's simply a clever way to process an analogy for what it's doing. To think that this is where we need to focus our time is a bit silly when you could be out in the streets. To me it feels like GitHub wants to have the illusion of being progressive while changing something that nobody considered even remotely offensive literally 24h ago

quattrofan 6y ago

Ridiculous. What exactly is this going to achieve? It's not like using the words with this meaning "celebrate" racism. For those like me who are liberals I can tell you this crap will guarantee populists like Trump continue to get into power.

qqj 6y ago

companies like github should remain apolitical. this is pure nonesense, merely a show of force by otherwise impotent and misguided liberals. take your outrage somewhere else.

circular_logic 6y ago

Git being a cli and "main" being shorter to type might help motivate those that are not convinced by the histoial arguments.