6 ms·

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 s

• 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.
        • bluntfang 6y ago
          >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. Of course not. It's just extremely immature when there are direct ways via work and effort (forking or contributing) to gain social capital in the community to influence change and direction.
        • aaomidi 6y ago
          So what are the downsides of git changing this? How is this going to impact your day to day work flow?
          • RhysU 6y ago
            "Lemme go run main" is now ambiguous. The main entry point? Or the main branch?
  • thaumasiotes 6y ago
    >> I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along. You didn't respond to this in any way.
    • defen 6y ago
      How do we know "they caved to pressure" as opposed to "were convinced of the merits of making the change"? Like I said, if enough people don't like this change, they can start their own fork called originalgit or something. It would be fairly easy to backport changes to it. Let the market decide whether the default branch should be called "master" or "main". Or, you could start a twitter campaign about how "main" reminds you of the Spanish colonization of the Americas and all the attendant horrors of that. Worse than the Atlantic slave trade? Maybe! If you can convince enough people that "main" is bad, maybe they'll switch it back.
  • blaklivesmatter 6y ago
    That is not the point. The point is millions of man months of time an money are being spent doing something that has zero meaning. Changing master/slave on networking, ok. Changing master copy to main copy doesn't remotely help black lives or black pride or anything whatsoever. If all the time and effort doing this was actually spent on useful things to help black lives it would be 10000x more effective. Instead all that time and effort is being flushed down the toilet.
    • jtlowe 6y ago
      It is meaningful in ways that are not measured in development time. There is a genuine effort to be less offensive regardless of how big of an impact it currently makes, or how meaningless individuals may believe it to be.
      • CincinnatiMan 6y ago
        I think there is disagreement over whether "master record" is offensive, and frustration that time and energy are wasted arguing over it (as commenters here are doing).
    • rzz3 6y ago
      Person months*, you can’t say that anymore.
• matthewmacleod 6y ago
  It’s sad to see so many in the tech community waste electrons by complaining over and over again about how something is such a non-issue for them that they can’t stop talking about it.
• kalkin 6y ago
  What is the principle that's at stake here?
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    That things that have nothing to do with US politics shouldn't be dragged into it. Words can have multiple meanings. Instead of removing a word and all it's homonyms from discourse we should embrace polysemy. Master key, master record, music maestro, master git branch...
• tdons 6y ago
  The intransigent minority [1] strikes again. Perhaps the tech community should grow a spine and stand up to the minority that demands these sort of changes. That is: if the tech community /really/ doesn't want them, which (to me) is unclear. [1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  • giancarlostoro 6y ago
    As an actual American minority I'm a little upset that instead of someone trying to do something meaningful about racism they bikeshedded this solution. Git was made by a man from Finland, I find it highly unlikely he had nefarious intentions in naming the default branch 'master' and anybody who disagrees really needs to reevaluate everything we know about Linus. He doesn't care about people's attributes, he cares about code quality above all things, not to mention in the context of the project the word master can only fit under the simple context of a golden master. Context matters. Will I lose any sleep over it? Probably not, because this changes absolutely nothing in the racism landscape. It just confuses some, maybe outrages others. They've made something that was never racist into something racist (at least in their heads). Sidenote: I do wonder if the person who proposed the change wrote it up from their master bedroom.
    • dingaling 6y ago
      > Git was made by a man from Finland ... and deliberately named it using a word that's offensive in British English. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git If you said 'git' to someone in an English pub you'd be looking for a punch. For USians it's roughly comparable to 'asshole' on the spectrum of offensiveness.
      • tarboreus 6y ago
        Git is a couple of pegs down from asshole. Better analogy in American English would be "jerk," without, perhaps, the implied sexual connotation.
• wadkar 6y ago
  I am happy to see this. You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive. It may not be that big of a deal for you but it is a big deal for those who don’t share the same worldview as you. Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others? What do you think about people who curse like a sailors in their personal life but wouldn’t utter an F in office/professional settings - do they have no principals?
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    Same here, I honestly don't even get why people are angry about this. You're saying master isn't a big deal, well, neither is main. Would've you cared if git updates this without the discourse of "let's remove master from our everyday conversations."
    • leshenka 6y ago
      Because next time yall say that 'main' is offensive because it puts some branches into position of power and actually they need to be more equal.
  • umvi 6y ago
    > but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized. It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc). And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that). I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.
• gkoberger 6y ago
  I think, of all the things to come out of BLM, this is one of the easiest to chalk up to “woke culture”. BUT I still support it 100%. What if you had to deal with the worst thing that’s ever happened to your people every time you want to push code at work? No, I don’t think anyone’s out there getting upset every commit, any more than they do walking into Thomas Jefferson High School or seeing a confederate flag on a bumper sticker. Rather, it’s just a constant subtle reminder of how ingrained in society racial inequality is, and it must be exhausting. I think an incredibly minor inconvenience (which can be changed back) is a very fair trade off.
  • pseudalopex 6y ago
    People campaigned to replace master and slave in technology long before BLM.
    • gkoberger 6y ago
      I know, however the change (in Git/GitHub, at least) was never made until now.
    • jobigoud 6y ago
      This is not master and slave. There are no slave branches. This is just seeing slavery everywhere. It's offensive to drag an innocuous homomym term (master/apprentice, master record) into the slavery lexical field.
• martinp 6y ago
  It’s a sad state of affairs when language is censored because of political correctness being taken to extremes. Context is important to understand the meaning of words. Outright removing the use of certain words, such as "master", regardless of context sets a dangerous precedent. Furthermore, the meaning of words change over time. To assume "master" always refers to a slave owner is assuming the worst possible intention behind use of the word and overloading it to mean something it no longer does. There's a limit to the degree you can expect other people to participate in your world view. Unfortunately, most tech companies and organization (especially American ones) are spineless and have already bent to the will of the mob.
• zeroimpl 6y ago
  I'm of the perspective that people arguing against these changes are bullying. The changes are easy to make, represent goodwill and inclusivity, and yet people with nothing to gain or lose are saying no. That's bullying.