19 ms·

Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

106 points by Trisell 6y ago

s_dev 6y ago
Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book. 'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.
- wackro 6y ago
  To answer your question - yes. And use of the acronymn RAID should be phased out as it is insensitive towards nordic people, the ancestors of whom spent centuries raiding European coastal towns. A bloody history they would rather move on from.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I think in that context "slave/master" is much worse than just "master node", as it's explicitly that relationship. In the ATA spec for example, the master/slave terminology no longer appears: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_clarification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_... Similarly, Jenkins started moving from "slave" to "agent" in 2016, and is now working on other terms such as master, whitelist/blacklist, etc: https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2020/06/18/terminology-update/ https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2020/06/18/terminology-update/
- kemayo 6y ago
  In RAID, unlike in git, the word "slave" is also used in conjunction with "master". That seems to inherently raise some negative associations... and it's not like "primary / secondary" aren't easily available substitutes.
  - s_dev 6y ago
    You've haven't solved the problem though -- just kicked the can down the road -- somebody could come along explain that their offended by the terms "primary" and "secondary" as it implies one is above the other when they prefer to see equality and no offence caused. When that happens you'll find yourself in the same position as us now who are saying the term "master" when discussing source control or HDD configuration is appropriate. Perhaps the answer is to understand that not everything is offensive even if interpreted initially that way. Nor does someone who claim to be offended actually have more skin in the game or more to their argument.
    - kemayo 6y ago
      Sure, but I don't think the prevailing argument here is that any offense no matter how small should be catered to. To produce a silly hypothetical, how about if anti-vaxxers got really upset about the phrase "code injection"? Even though anti-vaxxers are a worryingly large subgroup who've managed to return us to the days when measles is a thing to worry about, I still think that general cultural perception is such that everyone would roll their eyes at this complaint. Rather, for "master" and "slave" and "blacklist" and whatnot, it's that enough of a groundswell of awareness occurred in general society that a lot of people started to feel awkward about the use of a term. It's akin to how "negro" used to be a perfectly acceptable descriptive word, but if you used it in casual conversation now you'd get a negative reaction even though it's not the bad "n-word". We can't separate the current drive to replace slavery-related terms from the last few years of events in America. There's been a lot of events which have driven home to people that, yes, Black people in America are still having a rough time -- and in America, that inexorably ties to the historical reality of slavery. A lot of these replacements are symbolic, driven more by a desire to say "hey, we accept you! you are welcome in our community" than any severe offense at any particular term. But symbolic things matter in aggregate.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Are drives commonly referred to as master/slave in that context? With the exception of when hot spares are present the drives in each array are considered equal (unless perhaps you have some arrangement where all parity information is on a subset of the drives). Maybe during the initial build process if you are converting a single drive to an array (for instance by adding a mirror to convert to RAID1) you might call the original drive the master, but this is in the context of a master tape rather than a master/slave allusion and even then I think I would have naturally called it the "source" drive instead. The last time I remember referring to a drive as "master" was back when pre-SATA drive interfaces where dominant and you had up to two drives per interface cable.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive? I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged. AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.
- throwaheyy 6y ago
  Not sure I understand the idea of banning words being taken so far. I always interpreted Git’s usage of ‘master’ to mean the original replica. Like the golden master of a record or CD.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    this has been explained further again and again
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Nobody banned anything. They changed a default. Git was developed to replace Bitkeeper. Git's usage of master probably comes from Bitkeeper's usage of master and slave.
    - throwaheyy 6y ago
      Ok, that’s maybe a bit different.
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      No, the guy who picked the name "master", Petr Baudis, explained why he picked it: > "master" as in e.g. "master recording". https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nnutter 6y ago
“of or relating to a master from which copies are made: master film; master matrix; master record; master tape.”
umvi 6y ago
Sigh... sad to see the tech community bullied into compliance over a non-issue by political correctness activists. It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.
- ttmb 6y ago
  What is the principle of standing ground in and of itself? Standing ground for a good reason, yes, but without a good reason, what is the virtue of just standing?
- defen 6y ago
  Git is Free software so nothing is stopping people from forking it and excluding these patches if they feel that strongly about it.
  - revnode 6y ago
    You're then forced to maintain a fork because of someone else's immaturity. That's not a solution to the problem.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      I feel like complaining about a disagreement in direction of an open source project while not wanting to put effort in directing it in the way you like via the normal channels, forking or contribution, to be immature.
      - revnode 6y ago
        I feel like demanding contribution as a response to criticism of open source software is immature. Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.
denysvitali 6y ago
Can we please stop wondering about being politically correct and focus on the real problems of the world? Thanks! I would also like to add the fact that politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general. I don't think that any other engineering field has this much drama over some words that have been part of our whole life until now like IT is having.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  > politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general How would that work?
  - joh6nn 6y ago
    right? maybe Op would care to give examples of software issues that have no social or political ramifications?
    - denysvitali 6y ago
      Pure algorithms, for one. I don't think that Merge Sort for example has had or will ever have any political / social ramification. On the contrary, I see that now the SJW trend is to attack IT in general and make a huge deal out of terms that (given the context) are perfectly fine. I wonder how much it will take before we'll have to assign pronouns to the connetors or to the USB cables
      - aaomidi 6y ago
        We already assign pronouns and gender to connectors. Seems like you've not actually worked in IT if you don't know that? Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms. I think a lot of people here would've benefited taking a basic "ethics in CS" class.
        6y ago
zacwest 6y ago
The branch name "master" does not have "golden master" or "master copy" roots: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
- vtail 6y ago
  The error message in the commit that introduced that change uses the word “insane”. I hope they changed it to “mentally challenged”. https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb243ff86bae740b https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb...
- pininja 6y ago
  This should be the top comment to foster a conversation around sources we can dig up. The digital roots to word usages should be preserved as understanding is the first step to changing. I can’t casually read the bitkeeper “HOWTO” now without cringing at the word choice - it’s not that it didn’t age well, it’s that I used to lack empathy for its usage. I think treating this human relationship as a light hearted metaphor disregards the gravity of this painful history. Plenty of alternatives exist, and if one doesn’t in someone’s eyes the brilliant thing is new words and meanings can be invented. I accept criticism of using master/slave as a consequence of the actions taken by citizens in my country in the past. I’m willing to accept responsibility even when my self and family aren’t at fault. Edit: A second source of word history to review https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminology.html https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    And let's remember slavery is still a major part of our lives. Even to this day. Not making the word trivial is important in creating disgust and outrage, which eventually leads to policy changes to stop slavery happening right now.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  That's incorrect. Petr Baudis explained why he picked it: > "master" as in e.g. "master recording". https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 That's straight from the horse's mouth. The thread you linked to is pure conjecture.
PretzelFisch 6y ago
If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  IMO, it does exactly the opposite.
  - steviedotboston 6y ago
    how so?
- s_dev 6y ago
  Enduring a breaking change for something that will have absolutely 0 impact on the diversity, size or empathy of the software dev community.
- GhostVII 6y ago
  We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by. And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist. I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    > blacklist > sanity check Sorry to tell you, but the PC twinkies are going after those, too: https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the-new-debate-over-security-terminology/ https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the... https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e38899baf5cc https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388... There are significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity, to switching up so much terminology.
ttmb 6y ago
The change doesn't make my life worse in the slightest, and may improve someone else's mental health. No reason for me to be against it at all.
steviedotboston 6y ago
I've long felt that "trunk" is a much better name than "master" or "main".
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I dunno, I associate "trunk" very strongly with svn. My company's internal repos usually use "devel" as our default branch, but that's partly a convention inherited from the ROS ecosystem where the different main releases have a codename and fixes get patched between branches with names like jade-devel, kinetic-devel, lunar-devel, etc.
  - longcommonname 6y ago
    I don't like devel, because its usually coupled with git flow and stale release branches.
  - salawat 6y ago
    I hear trunk and think telephony. SVN was always odd in going with the tree metaphor, as trees never really grow back into themselves normally.
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      To be fair, branching in svn is kind of a one-way street. A functional merge and conflict resolution workflow was part of what won over a lot of us to git from it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
_pmf_ 6y ago
This will save so many slaves.
e2le 6y ago
What exactly is the rationale behind changing the default branch name? It seems like significant effort is being devoted to this (code changes, fixing broken CI, etc.) but I don't understand why any of it is necessary.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  I found this to be a good write up: https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminology.html https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...
pyentropy 6y ago
Will there be a warning if you try to use 'master' as a refname if it doesn't exist but 'main' does? I assume beginners using educational resources that aren't up to date with this change will be really confused.
- junon 6y ago
  This was my concern as well. Millions of pieces of literature are going to be immediately obsoleted. Books, articles, whole interactive tutorials, everything. What about tools that create the `master` branch locally then try to sync it from the remote? Sure it's not a great assumption anyway but those tools originally acting in good-faith will now break and the user will be left up to figure out why. All because a few people who find offense in everything were super duper loud. Awesome precedent.
raverbashing 6y ago
Political issues aside, it seems that 'master' was hardcoded in several places on the code I'd have imagined that it was more of a config issue than code, but apparently not.
hansdieter1337 6y ago
Looking forward to all the bugs and problems this will cause. At least some over-sensitive ppl (or trolls?) will be happy. One more to add to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_the_George_Floyd_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_...
- emerged 6y ago
  They will not be happy. That is not in their nature.
secondcoming 6y ago
When this came up initially I asked some of our PoC employees for their thoughts on it down the pub. One didn't care, and the other thought it was stupid. We did change to exclusion/inclusion lists though, as that terminology is used when communicating with customers.
nromiun 6y ago
I don't really mind this change. But selective outrage like this is really strange. Some people on Twitter decide a word is offensive and the next day I am just expected to just stop using them. It's hard enough to learn English without these new laws all the time. I don't think this happens to any other language.
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  They got a taste of power, and so the demands will continue. The tyranny of the least tolerant strikes again.
- nicbou 6y ago
  It's nothing new. I'm in my late twenties, and I can name a few words we stopped using in my lifetime.
- greatgib 6y ago
  Any one to post on twitter that 'scrum master' is offensive? Especially when there are people of minorities in scrum? So that I can grab some popcorn and have fun watching the world going full speed to Idiocracy world!
devenblake 6y ago
Personally, I love this change. "main" takes less time to type than "master".
rozab 6y ago
This will have broken tens of thousands of beginner programming tutorials. Very unfortunate.
- dspillett 6y ago
  Teaches the beginners a valuable lesson about relying on defaults I suppose...
- jtlowe 6y ago
  Hopefully many of these tutorials will be updated or replaced by other resources over time. It would be helpful if git threw a descriptive error when trying to check out 'master' if it doesn't exist, and is not set to the default branch.
renewiltord 6y ago
Non-issue. I've run the following because I'm used to it: git config --global init.defaultBranch master This default doesn't matter to me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nicbou 6y ago
  This is my favourite comment in this thread. Everyone is losing their minds and you just changed your config and carried on with you day.
  - junon 6y ago
    Don't exaggerate. People are (rightly) concerned over the precedent this sets and the issue to tooling and other parts of the development workflow. Of course this doesn't affect everyone the same way. Don't demonize people for raising concerns.
  - KMag 6y ago
    All of this arguing is political, not technical. This technical solution does nothing for the political disagreement.
wayneftw 6y ago
Meh. I'll change it back. I'm not "dying on a hill" either when I do this because nobody will care. Nobody that I work with will care and nobody that looks at my source code online will care. If and when someone does care about what I name my branch, it will be an easy way for me to identify a person that I would rather avoid working with. The reason I care enough to even change it back is because I think the whole idea is driven by stupidity and it's my personal policy to not give into stupid demands. I simply don't do political correctness. If people don't like it, they can just fuck right off.
GhostVII 6y ago
I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expectation is that you change your language to accommodate the tiny number of people who are offended for no reason. Language is a tool, and changes over time. If the meaning of a word actually changes to mean something offensive of course we should change it. But that isn't what has happened here, instead people are picking out one offensive definition of "master" and trying to apply it to places where it doesn't make sense. Are we going to rename "master of ceremonies", or "master record"? Of course not, because in a language where words have multiple definitions, context matters.
- jamienicol 6y ago
  You are welcome to be as unaccomodating as you'd like in your own projects, but if the people doing the work in projects such as git want to make this change that is their choice. what you're really arguing is that they should be accomodating to your opinion and not others'. "master" in a computer science context isn't named after master of ceremonies, but after the offensive master/slave meaning.
  - GhostVII 6y ago
    It's their choice, but I still don't like the precedent it sets. I don't really care what they call it, I just don't want this kind of thing to become an expectation, resulting in me either having to do a bunch of renaming work or risk being seen as some kind of ist.
    - jamienicol 6y ago
      I'd try worrying less about possibly having to do some menial work or being perceived as an ist, and instead try to understand why some might be offended by such terms or what impact their prevalence might have on our profession and wider society.
throw7 6y ago
The people who believe this is correct are the racists. The pen is truly mightier than the sword, unfortunately for you, it's run out of ink.
gorgoiler 6y ago
In my professional experience as a teacher of high school children the following terms consistently cause problems in class: - git: literally a pejorative - any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys Imagine a software project called catshit made popular by a related website called catshitpiss where their great pearl-clutching debate is about how it potentially alienates people with cat fur allergies.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > - git: literally a pejorative And very deliberately so. >- any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys Does -hub have a general negative connotation in your language? In English it just refers to a centre of something, in physical objects usually something with a radial topology. If the existence of pornhub.com is enough to make the use of the pattern *hub problematical generally then I'm going to create pornbread.com and force everyone to eat untoast & butter.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    My native language, despite what people think of my ability to write, is English. Bread is too quotidian for your example, I think. Try subverting something more closely related to computers. Perhaps launching pornhaskell.co.ck would be a better attempt? It’s more likely to generate embarrassment in class if you ask the boys if they’ve been up all night with sticky Haskell problems. Good luck!
    - Biganon 6y ago
      Except "porn" is by definition related to porn, whereas "hub" is completely generic? Why would a word cease to be OK because a porn website has been using it?
TooRightKite 6y ago
A lot of kids need to get out and earn some scrapes on their knees. We are doomed if the next generation is truly this embarrassingly soft (though fortunately I am of the opinion that this is coming from a minority who didn't have any older siblings to put them in their place growing up).
fimdomeio 6y ago
There's a saying in my language that translated goes something like: "Words are taken by the wind".
fimdomeio 6y ago
And I hope very soon we will replace the concept of users from platforms like google and facebook, since we're the one's being used.
nickpp 6y ago
I am still waiting for them to stop using the world ROBOTS. It means slaves.
kissiel 6y ago
As a Slav I feel offended by changes like this, mainly because it means that someone saw a word that - in a totally different context - and thought of the bad meaning. What next? s/killall/pleaseturnoff? I also have a bad feeling about Parus major (the bird).
Khaine 6y ago
Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Probably people thought about it for 2 seconds and realised it isn't true.
  - Khaine 6y ago
    Maybe they should have thought about it some more, like the stoics: "The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do." - Marcus Aureliu "When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval." - Epictetus "Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference." - Marcus Aurelius
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      An unrealistic goal. No man is an island.
aronpye 6y ago
I’m fascinated when people, including myself, are offended by noises other people make with their faces. You can try to ban words, but that doesn’t abolish the thought that generated the word. However, that doesn’t stop people from trying. Ultimately compelled speech is an attempt at mind control. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak “Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania, the ruling English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.” — In the future, how will people be able to judge whether they are enslaved or oppressed if the concepts and historical records of slavery are erased?
emptysongglass 6y ago
This is ethics grandstanding without putting in any of the work and does more to divide us human beings than it does to heal. Class politics not identity politics. All of us are workers in the service of the true masters holding the leash to capital emancipation. This is how I know you black brother, this is how I know you Asian sister, my fellow workers. It's the cause worth fighting for, not helpless endless division built on a bedrock I can never be: the color of your skin or the shape of your brow.
sputr 6y ago
I'm fine with this. It costs me almost nothing, but it means something to some people and I see no reason to block them from getting it. And its gonna be juuuust a bit easier to explain git to non native speakers who understand 'main' and not 'master'. A bit. Tiny bit.
csense 6y ago
Political correctness run amok. It's dumb that people find this offensive. It's dumber that people are renaming their branches. It's dumbest that Git itself has been consumed by this madness.
sorokod 6y ago
There is a scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz says: "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!" I find these shananigans very much in the same spirit.
agustif 6y ago
The other day I noticed my freshly created repo on GH was with main, and I took the time to create a master and make it the new default, and then deleting main. It was my only way to say FU to the word police mafia
TechBro8615 6y ago
When will they change the name of the software itself? I’m pretty sure “git” is a more offensive term than “master,” as it means an “unpleasant or contemptible person.” The point of the word is to use it when intending to be offensive.
rubyist5eva 6y ago
git branch -m main master
nicbou 6y ago
All political correctness talk aside, "main" is a much better name for the main branch. There was a similar debate about blacklist and whitelist, and I much prefer the recommended alternative: blocklist and allowlist. The meanings if those new terms are self-evident.
tsujp 6y ago
Politics does not belong in tech.
fargle 6y ago
I will NEVER cave to this kind of narrow-minded bigoted thinking. Thank god for open-source. Revert, revert, revert.
imtringued 6y ago
Let's create an excuse to be angry and then another excuse to be angry at people who aren't angry.
adontz 6y ago
I think there is more to this than people usually see. While I agree to those who say that people are being irrationally offended, I see banning of word master as exactly what would a master do. Not only methods are silly, because it seems a paradox to me that enforcing unfair policies makes happier those who were victims of unfair policy enforcement. (Oh, wait, no paradox here, just human nature), but what concerns me much more is enforcing of US culture. Companies eliminate words master, black, and others like offensive ones, but they may not be offensive in other cultures. Even more, replacements may be even more offensive. Why questionable fear of offending some of 40 million black U.S. people by just using a word, without any intent to offend anyone is enough to enforce some country-specific culture based policy on 7 billion people?
tyrion 6y ago
Now I am tempted to set the default branch to "offensive" or "inappropriate" :D On a more serious note, I can agree that the master/slave terminology is not the best choice of words, but how is the usage of the word "master" in git deemed offensive?
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  It wasn't necessarily deemed "offensive", simply that its roots in master/slave terminology (indirectly [0] in predecessor VCS Bitkeeper which did have a concept of "slave repositories" that git fortunately does not share) was not the best choice of words and given they have the option to somewhat easily change the default, because it was already a config flag, they could just easily change the default (as this changeset does). [0] The developer that chose git's default did not intentionally choose the default because it was Bitkeeper's default/terminology, but the developer was a Bitkeeper user at that time and its subconscious influence in reusing terminology would have been strong.

106 points by Trisell 6y ago

Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book. 'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.

wackro 6y ago
To answer your question - yes. And use of the acronymn RAID should be phased out as it is insensitive towards nordic people, the ancestors of whom spent centuries raiding European coastal towns. A bloody history they would rather move on from.
mikepurvis 6y ago
I think in that context "slave/master" is much worse than just "master node", as it's explicitly that relationship. In the ATA spec for example, the master/slave terminology no longer appears: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_clarification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#Master_and_slave_... Similarly, Jenkins started moving from "slave" to "agent" in 2016, and is now working on other terms such as master, whitelist/blacklist, etc: https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2020/06/18/terminology-update/ https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2020/06/18/terminology-update/
kemayo 6y ago
In RAID, unlike in git, the word "slave" is also used in conjunction with "master". That seems to inherently raise some negative associations... and it's not like "primary / secondary" aren't easily available substitutes.
- s_dev 6y ago
  You've haven't solved the problem though -- just kicked the can down the road -- somebody could come along explain that their offended by the terms "primary" and "secondary" as it implies one is above the other when they prefer to see equality and no offence caused. When that happens you'll find yourself in the same position as us now who are saying the term "master" when discussing source control or HDD configuration is appropriate. Perhaps the answer is to understand that not everything is offensive even if interpreted initially that way. Nor does someone who claim to be offended actually have more skin in the game or more to their argument.
  - kemayo 6y ago
    Sure, but I don't think the prevailing argument here is that any offense no matter how small should be catered to. To produce a silly hypothetical, how about if anti-vaxxers got really upset about the phrase "code injection"? Even though anti-vaxxers are a worryingly large subgroup who've managed to return us to the days when measles is a thing to worry about, I still think that general cultural perception is such that everyone would roll their eyes at this complaint. Rather, for "master" and "slave" and "blacklist" and whatnot, it's that enough of a groundswell of awareness occurred in general society that a lot of people started to feel awkward about the use of a term. It's akin to how "negro" used to be a perfectly acceptable descriptive word, but if you used it in casual conversation now you'd get a negative reaction even though it's not the bad "n-word". We can't separate the current drive to replace slavery-related terms from the last few years of events in America. There's been a lot of events which have driven home to people that, yes, Black people in America are still having a rough time -- and in America, that inexorably ties to the historical reality of slavery. A lot of these replacements are symbolic, driven more by a desire to say "hey, we accept you! you are welcome in our community" than any severe offense at any particular term. But symbolic things matter in aggregate.
dspillett 6y ago
> will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Are drives commonly referred to as master/slave in that context? With the exception of when hot spares are present the drives in each array are considered equal (unless perhaps you have some arrangement where all parity information is on a subset of the drives). Maybe during the initial build process if you are converting a single drive to an array (for instance by adding a mirror to convert to RAID1) you might call the original drive the master, but this is in the context of a master tape rather than a master/slave allusion and even then I think I would have naturally called it the "source" drive instead. The last time I remember referring to a drive as "master" was back when pre-SATA drive interfaces where dominant and you had up to two drives per interface cable.

tachyonbeam 6y ago

If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive? I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged. AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.

throwaheyy 6y ago
Not sure I understand the idea of banning words being taken so far. I always interpreted Git’s usage of ‘master’ to mean the original replica. Like the golden master of a record or CD.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  this has been explained further again and again
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Nobody banned anything. They changed a default. Git was developed to replace Bitkeeper. Git's usage of master probably comes from Bitkeeper's usage of master and slave.
  - throwaheyy 6y ago
    Ok, that’s maybe a bit different.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    No, the guy who picked the name "master", Petr Baudis, explained why he picked it: > "master" as in e.g. "master recording". https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nnutter 6y ago

“of or relating to a master from which copies are made: master film; master matrix; master record; master tape.”

umvi 6y ago

Sigh... sad to see the tech community bullied into compliance over a non-issue by political correctness activists. It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.

ttmb 6y ago
What is the principle of standing ground in and of itself? Standing ground for a good reason, yes, but without a good reason, what is the virtue of just standing?
defen 6y ago
Git is Free software so nothing is stopping people from forking it and excluding these patches if they feel that strongly about it.
- revnode 6y ago
  You're then forced to maintain a fork because of someone else's immaturity. That's not a solution to the problem.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    I feel like complaining about a disagreement in direction of an open source project while not wanting to put effort in directing it in the way you like via the normal channels, forking or contribution, to be immature.
    - revnode 6y ago
      I feel like demanding contribution as a response to criticism of open source software is immature. Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.

denysvitali 6y ago

Can we please stop wondering about being politically correct and focus on the real problems of the world? Thanks! I would also like to add the fact that politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general. I don't think that any other engineering field has this much drama over some words that have been part of our whole life until now like IT is having.

cratermoon 6y ago
> politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general How would that work?
- joh6nn 6y ago
  right? maybe Op would care to give examples of software issues that have no social or political ramifications?
  - denysvitali 6y ago
    Pure algorithms, for one. I don't think that Merge Sort for example has had or will ever have any political / social ramification. On the contrary, I see that now the SJW trend is to attack IT in general and make a huge deal out of terms that (given the context) are perfectly fine. I wonder how much it will take before we'll have to assign pronouns to the connetors or to the USB cables
    - aaomidi 6y ago
      We already assign pronouns and gender to connectors. Seems like you've not actually worked in IT if you don't know that? Pure algorithms have the capacity to change the world. Sometimes for the worse. An example of a pure algorithm with massive political and ethical considerations is crypto currency algorithms. I think a lot of people here would've benefited taking a basic "ethics in CS" class.
      - 6y ago

zacwest 6y ago

The branch name "master" does not have "golden master" or "master copy" roots: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

vtail 6y ago
The error message in the commit that introduced that change uses the word “insane”. I hope they changed it to “mentally challenged”. https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb243ff86bae740b https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb...
pininja 6y ago
This should be the top comment to foster a conversation around sources we can dig up. The digital roots to word usages should be preserved as understanding is the first step to changing. I can’t casually read the bitkeeper “HOWTO” now without cringing at the word choice - it’s not that it didn’t age well, it’s that I used to lack empathy for its usage. I think treating this human relationship as a light hearted metaphor disregards the gravity of this painful history. Plenty of alternatives exist, and if one doesn’t in someone’s eyes the brilliant thing is new words and meanings can be invented. I accept criticism of using master/slave as a consequence of the actions taken by citizens in my country in the past. I’m willing to accept responsibility even when my self and family aren’t at fault. Edit: A second source of word history to review https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminology.html https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...
- aaomidi 6y ago
  And let's remember slavery is still a major part of our lives. Even to this day. Not making the word trivial is important in creating disgust and outrage, which eventually leads to policy changes to stop slavery happening right now.
wayneftw 6y ago
That's incorrect. Petr Baudis explained why he picked it: > "master" as in e.g. "master recording". https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441 That's straight from the horse's mouth. The thread you linked to is pure conjecture.

PretzelFisch 6y ago

If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
IMO, it does exactly the opposite.
- steviedotboston 6y ago
  how so?
s_dev 6y ago
Enduring a breaking change for something that will have absolutely 0 impact on the diversity, size or empathy of the software dev community.
GhostVII 6y ago
We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably going to be offended by. And once the expectation is that you change your language based on the irrationally offended minority, if you refuse to do so because it is a lot of work and makes no sense you become deamonized as some kind of sexist/racist/*ist. I've seen lots of people claim that if you aren't a part of the minority in question you have no right to say what is or isn't offensive. I strongly disagree, some people are offended for stupid reasons, and we shouldn't feel obligated to accommodate them. Now if a significant portion are offended then there is probably some legitimate reason behind it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  > blacklist > sanity check Sorry to tell you, but the PC twinkies are going after those, too: https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the-new-debate-over-security-terminology/ https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the... https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e38899baf5cc https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388... There are significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity, to switching up so much terminology.

ttmb 6y ago

The change doesn't make my life worse in the slightest, and may improve someone else's mental health. No reason for me to be against it at all.

steviedotboston 6y ago

I've long felt that "trunk" is a much better name than "master" or "main".

mikepurvis 6y ago
I dunno, I associate "trunk" very strongly with svn. My company's internal repos usually use "devel" as our default branch, but that's partly a convention inherited from the ROS ecosystem where the different main releases have a codename and fixes get patched between branches with names like jade-devel, kinetic-devel, lunar-devel, etc.
- longcommonname 6y ago
  I don't like devel, because its usually coupled with git flow and stale release branches.
- salawat 6y ago
  I hear trunk and think telephony. SVN was always odd in going with the tree metaphor, as trees never really grow back into themselves normally.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    To be fair, branching in svn is kind of a one-way street. A functional merge and conflict resolution workflow was part of what won over a lot of us to git from it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

_pmf_ 6y ago

This will save so many slaves.

e2le 6y ago

What exactly is the rationale behind changing the default branch name? It seems like significant effort is being devoted to this (code changes, fixing broken CI, etc.) but I don't understand why any of it is necessary.

bluntfang 6y ago
I found this to be a good write up: https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminology.html https://econoben.github.io/2020/10/20/master-slave-terminolo...

pyentropy 6y ago

Will there be a warning if you try to use 'master' as a refname if it doesn't exist but 'main' does? I assume beginners using educational resources that aren't up to date with this change will be really confused.

junon 6y ago
This was my concern as well. Millions of pieces of literature are going to be immediately obsoleted. Books, articles, whole interactive tutorials, everything. What about tools that create the `master` branch locally then try to sync it from the remote? Sure it's not a great assumption anyway but those tools originally acting in good-faith will now break and the user will be left up to figure out why. All because a few people who find offense in everything were super duper loud. Awesome precedent.

raverbashing 6y ago

Political issues aside, it seems that 'master' was hardcoded in several places on the code I'd have imagined that it was more of a config issue than code, but apparently not.

hansdieter1337 6y ago

Looking forward to all the bugs and problems this will cause. At least some over-sensitive ppl (or trolls?) will be happy. One more to add to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_the_George_Floyd_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_...

emerged 6y ago
They will not be happy. That is not in their nature.

secondcoming 6y ago

When this came up initially I asked some of our PoC employees for their thoughts on it down the pub. One didn't care, and the other thought it was stupid. We did change to exclusion/inclusion lists though, as that terminology is used when communicating with customers.

nromiun 6y ago

I don't really mind this change. But selective outrage like this is really strange. Some people on Twitter decide a word is offensive and the next day I am just expected to just stop using them. It's hard enough to learn English without these new laws all the time. I don't think this happens to any other language.

disposekinetics 6y ago
They got a taste of power, and so the demands will continue. The tyranny of the least tolerant strikes again.
nicbou 6y ago
It's nothing new. I'm in my late twenties, and I can name a few words we stopped using in my lifetime.
greatgib 6y ago
Any one to post on twitter that 'scrum master' is offensive? Especially when there are people of minorities in scrum? So that I can grab some popcorn and have fun watching the world going full speed to Idiocracy world!

devenblake 6y ago

Personally, I love this change. "main" takes less time to type than "master".

rozab 6y ago

This will have broken tens of thousands of beginner programming tutorials. Very unfortunate.

dspillett 6y ago
Teaches the beginners a valuable lesson about relying on defaults I suppose...
jtlowe 6y ago
Hopefully many of these tutorials will be updated or replaced by other resources over time. It would be helpful if git threw a descriptive error when trying to check out 'master' if it doesn't exist, and is not set to the default branch.

renewiltord 6y ago

Non-issue. I've run the following because I'm used to it: git config --global init.defaultBranch master This default doesn't matter to me.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nicbou 6y ago
This is my favourite comment in this thread. Everyone is losing their minds and you just changed your config and carried on with you day.
- junon 6y ago
  Don't exaggerate. People are (rightly) concerned over the precedent this sets and the issue to tooling and other parts of the development workflow. Of course this doesn't affect everyone the same way. Don't demonize people for raising concerns.
- KMag 6y ago
  All of this arguing is political, not technical. This technical solution does nothing for the political disagreement.

wayneftw 6y ago

Meh. I'll change it back. I'm not "dying on a hill" either when I do this because nobody will care. Nobody that I work with will care and nobody that looks at my source code online will care. If and when someone does care about what I name my branch, it will be an easy way for me to identify a person that I would rather avoid working with. The reason I care enough to even change it back is because I think the whole idea is driven by stupidity and it's my personal policy to not give into stupid demands. I simply don't do political correctness. If people don't like it, they can just fuck right off.

GhostVII 6y ago

I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expectation is that you change your language to accommodate the tiny number of people who are offended for no reason. Language is a tool, and changes over time. If the meaning of a word actually changes to mean something offensive of course we should change it. But that isn't what has happened here, instead people are picking out one offensive definition of "master" and trying to apply it to places where it doesn't make sense. Are we going to rename "master of ceremonies", or "master record"? Of course not, because in a language where words have multiple definitions, context matters.

jamienicol 6y ago
You are welcome to be as unaccomodating as you'd like in your own projects, but if the people doing the work in projects such as git want to make this change that is their choice. what you're really arguing is that they should be accomodating to your opinion and not others'. "master" in a computer science context isn't named after master of ceremonies, but after the offensive master/slave meaning.
- GhostVII 6y ago
  It's their choice, but I still don't like the precedent it sets. I don't really care what they call it, I just don't want this kind of thing to become an expectation, resulting in me either having to do a bunch of renaming work or risk being seen as some kind of ist.
  - jamienicol 6y ago
    I'd try worrying less about possibly having to do some menial work or being perceived as an ist, and instead try to understand why some might be offended by such terms or what impact their prevalence might have on our profession and wider society.

throw7 6y ago

The people who believe this is correct are the racists. The pen is truly mightier than the sword, unfortunately for you, it's run out of ink.

gorgoiler 6y ago

In my professional experience as a teacher of high school children the following terms consistently cause problems in class: - git: literally a pejorative - any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys Imagine a software project called catshit made popular by a related website called catshitpiss where their great pearl-clutching debate is about how it potentially alienates people with cat fur allergies.

dspillett 6y ago
> - git: literally a pejorative And very deliberately so. >- any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys Does -hub have a general negative connotation in your language? In English it just refers to a centre of something, in physical objects usually something with a radial topology. If the existence of pornhub.com is enough to make the use of the pattern *hub problematical generally then I'm going to create pornbread.com and force everyone to eat untoast & butter.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  My native language, despite what people think of my ability to write, is English. Bread is too quotidian for your example, I think. Try subverting something more closely related to computers. Perhaps launching pornhaskell.co.ck would be a better attempt? It’s more likely to generate embarrassment in class if you ask the boys if they’ve been up all night with sticky Haskell problems. Good luck!
  - Biganon 6y ago
    Except "porn" is by definition related to porn, whereas "hub" is completely generic? Why would a word cease to be OK because a porn website has been using it?

TooRightKite 6y ago

A lot of kids need to get out and earn some scrapes on their knees. We are doomed if the next generation is truly this embarrassingly soft (though fortunately I am of the opinion that this is coming from a minority who didn't have any older siblings to put them in their place growing up).

fimdomeio 6y ago

There's a saying in my language that translated goes something like: "Words are taken by the wind".

fimdomeio 6y ago

And I hope very soon we will replace the concept of users from platforms like google and facebook, since we're the one's being used.

nickpp 6y ago

I am still waiting for them to stop using the world ROBOTS. It means slaves.

kissiel 6y ago

As a Slav I feel offended by changes like this, mainly because it means that someone saw a word that - in a totally different context - and thought of the bad meaning. What next? s/killall/pleaseturnoff? I also have a bad feeling about Parus major (the bird).

Khaine 6y ago

Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"

IshKebab 6y ago
Probably people thought about it for 2 seconds and realised it isn't true.
- Khaine 6y ago
  Maybe they should have thought about it some more, like the stoics: "The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do." - Marcus Aureliu "When someone is properly grounded in life, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval." - Epictetus "Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference." - Marcus Aurelius
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    An unrealistic goal. No man is an island.

aronpye 6y ago

I’m fascinated when people, including myself, are offended by noises other people make with their faces. You can try to ban words, but that doesn’t abolish the thought that generated the word. However, that doesn’t stop people from trying. Ultimately compelled speech is an attempt at mind control. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak “Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania, the ruling English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.” — In the future, how will people be able to judge whether they are enslaved or oppressed if the concepts and historical records of slavery are erased?

emptysongglass 6y ago

This is ethics grandstanding without putting in any of the work and does more to divide us human beings than it does to heal. Class politics not identity politics. All of us are workers in the service of the true masters holding the leash to capital emancipation. This is how I know you black brother, this is how I know you Asian sister, my fellow workers. It's the cause worth fighting for, not helpless endless division built on a bedrock I can never be: the color of your skin or the shape of your brow.

sputr 6y ago

I'm fine with this. It costs me almost nothing, but it means something to some people and I see no reason to block them from getting it. And its gonna be juuuust a bit easier to explain git to non native speakers who understand 'main' and not 'master'. A bit. Tiny bit.

csense 6y ago

Political correctness run amok. It's dumb that people find this offensive. It's dumber that people are renaming their branches. It's dumbest that Git itself has been consumed by this madness.

sorokod 6y ago

There is a scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz says: "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!" I find these shananigans very much in the same spirit.

agustif 6y ago

The other day I noticed my freshly created repo on GH was with main, and I took the time to create a master and make it the new default, and then deleting main. It was my only way to say FU to the word police mafia

TechBro8615 6y ago

When will they change the name of the software itself? I’m pretty sure “git” is a more offensive term than “master,” as it means an “unpleasant or contemptible person.” The point of the word is to use it when intending to be offensive.

rubyist5eva 6y ago

git branch -m main master

nicbou 6y ago

All political correctness talk aside, "main" is a much better name for the main branch. There was a similar debate about blacklist and whitelist, and I much prefer the recommended alternative: blocklist and allowlist. The meanings if those new terms are self-evident.

tsujp 6y ago

Politics does not belong in tech.

fargle 6y ago

I will NEVER cave to this kind of narrow-minded bigoted thinking. Thank god for open-source. Revert, revert, revert.

imtringued 6y ago

Let's create an excuse to be angry and then another excuse to be angry at people who aren't angry.

adontz 6y ago

I think there is more to this than people usually see. While I agree to those who say that people are being irrationally offended, I see banning of word master as exactly what would a master do. Not only methods are silly, because it seems a paradox to me that enforcing unfair policies makes happier those who were victims of unfair policy enforcement. (Oh, wait, no paradox here, just human nature), but what concerns me much more is enforcing of US culture. Companies eliminate words master, black, and others like offensive ones, but they may not be offensive in other cultures. Even more, replacements may be even more offensive. Why questionable fear of offending some of 40 million black U.S. people by just using a word, without any intent to offend anyone is enough to enforce some country-specific culture based policy on 7 billion people?

tyrion 6y ago

Now I am tempted to set the default branch to "offensive" or "inappropriate" :D On a more serious note, I can agree that the master/slave terminology is not the best choice of words, but how is the usage of the word "master" in git deemed offensive?

WorldMaker 6y ago
It wasn't necessarily deemed "offensive", simply that its roots in master/slave terminology (indirectly [0] in predecessor VCS Bitkeeper which did have a concept of "slave repositories" that git fortunately does not share) was not the best choice of words and given they have the option to somewhat easily change the default, because it was already a config flag, they could just easily change the default (as this changeset does). [0] The developer that chose git's default did not intentionally choose the default because it was Bitkeeper's default/terminology, but the developer was a Bitkeeper user at that time and its subconscious influence in reusing terminology would have been strong.