15 ms·

Gitlab default branch name changes to main

105 points by ProZsolt 6y ago

gear54rus 6y ago
Another victim of this hysteria. Will surely make a point to switch it back every time I create a repo.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Downvoted because sneering dismissal serves no purpose except to make discourse more toxic.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  You sound more hysterical than they do. How badly does this affect you and your life, really?
  - rualca 6y ago
    > You sound more hysterical than they do. How badly does this affect you and your life, really? So much this. Naming things is an arbitrary process, and adopting a default naming suggestion to accommodate someone's sensibilities is something that does not have any negative impact on anyone. At all. To those who are whining about a default naming suggestion: grow up.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 6y ago
  See, that would be making yourself a victim of "hysteria". If you just raised an eyebrow and moved on then your claim that it's "hysteria" might have more weight but you'd have less opportunity to grandstand about it. This is also an amusing choice of terminology because of the origin of the word hysteria but I'm going to guess you didn't do that on purpose.
  - hYKdTfpa 6y ago
    Do we really have to examine the origin of every word we use rather than according its modern common usage and use in context?
    - truculent 6y ago
      We're not examining every word. This article is about examining a specific word, with a specific history, within a specific context.
      - vshager 6y ago
        In a specific country, whose industry takes free open source labor from all over the world and then imposes its own cultural values. Open source people from other regions provide the majority of code and have no say in political decisions. One might be tempted to say that they are slaves.
        truculent 6y ago
        > imposes its own cultural values. This is a default. If it offends your sensibilities so much, you can configure it to be something else. Heck, I'd even go as far as suggesting that "main" is a more common word for non-native speakers of english than "master", making it more intuitive for non-US developers.
        dang 6y ago
        Please don't use HN for political and ideological flamewar, regardless of what you're battling for or against. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - meepmorp 6y ago
      Why are you so invested in something with so very little impact on you?
  - gher-shyu3i 6y ago
- sinistro25 6y ago
  I fell too that this master-slave thing is a overstretch and a little hysteria. That being said, I do think 'main' is a better name for what this branch is supposed to be and it might be better for beginners to understand. Of course, 'master' is the term we are all used to and that will cause a lot of confusion and broken pipelines too.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Whether it's called "master" or "main" affects me very little. Whether it's called "master" or "main" affects some people very much. I'm enough of a team player that I'm willing to make the switch to make others more comfortable.
  - hYKdTfpa 6y ago
    No, it doesn't affect anyone. It's a perfectly legitimate use of the word.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - vshager 6y ago
    Do you think they'll stop there? Revolutions are perpetual and once you have fed the beast, it comes back for more.
- pezezin 6y ago
  I did that recently. I had been developing some code for a few months, committing to a local repo, and I finally decided to upload it to GitHub. The local branch was named "master" because that is Git's default, but GitHub decided it should be "main", so the first thing I did after creating the repo was to revert it to "master". Fuck virtue signalling and Twitter keyboard warriors. My parents grew up under an oppressive ultra-catholic dictatorship where they had to pretend to be "good" Christians, and I for sure don't want society to go the same way again.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Adoption of more inclusive terms is hardly "hysteria". This IETF memo^1 makes a rational, compelling case for adopting alternate terms. I encourage you to read it, and try taking a broader, more empathetic view. Pause to consider the weight and connotations of certain words for certain groups of people, before claiming victimhood or accusing others of hysteria. Characterizing the change as "PC Politburo" word-policing strikes me as a shallow, knee-jerk response to a positive change. Fewer characters, less baggage, clearer semantics. What's the harm? 1. https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-04.html https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-04.html
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    Part of taking a broad and empathetic approach is understanding all people's emotions, thoughts and desires without necessarily sympathetiszing with them. Empathy is a pre requisite for agreement, discussion and conflict resolution. What these types of changes show, however is that there is no discussion and the opposition to such change indicates a "lack of empathy" which is a classic othering tactic. That to me is worrying. People should be able to meet in the middle, to negotiate change. These types of change appear to have been done with no real agreement, no meeting in the middle. It appears as if, ironically (and with a bit of exaggeration from me), no empathy outside of the ingroup was used. The reality is no holistic understanding or discussion is required as it's a foregone decision and one where almost everyone in this discussion forum has no say about. We should just get on and live with it.
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      "What these types of changes show, however is that there is no discussion and the opposition to such change indicates a "lack of empathy" which is a classic othering tactic." Huh? That's quite a bit further a stretch than any of the "woke" accusations I've received for suggesting a pivot from "master" to "main" might actually be a simple improvement.
- amiga-workbench 6y ago
  Is it really necessary to change it every time? Github did the same thing last year, I just went into my organisations settings and switched the default back to master.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This sort of provocation is close to trolling. It seriously damages the thread, especially when the topic is provocative. Please don't do it again. There are plenty of ways to make substantive comments on both sides of this question, as other users have demonstrated. Please either do that instead, or (always a fine option) don't post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - alacombe 6y ago
    This all thread is a huge flamewar...
    - dang 6y ago
      It's a matter of degree. If you don't consider that, it leads to a nihilistic "why bother" attitude that actually makes things much worse. Let's inch our way toward something better instead.
rvz 6y ago
Right I should have known that it is Sunday slow news day.
- alacombe 6y ago
  SV SJW white-knights are getting bored since they got orange man out.
Longhanks 6y ago
I wonder if a master's degree is also offensive.
- A12-B 6y ago
  Master has multiple definitions, yours is not the same as the one git used.
  - Longhanks 6y ago
    Exactly, and gits is not the same one as a slave master.
    - beojan 6y ago
      Turns out it is: > This term came from Bitkeeper, a predecessor to Git. Bitkeeper referred to the source of truth as the "master repository" and other copies as "slave repositories".
      - rjknight 6y ago
        In all of the previous discussions of this topic, I have never seen this simple fact pointed out. To me, this is a definitive argument for changing the name. If the facts had been different, I might have seen the matter differently, but if these are the facts then the name change makes sense.
      - temporama1 6y ago
        Bitkeeper must be punished for these transgressions.
      - Longhanks 6y ago
        Turns out the meaning can change over time. I'm confident the number of people using a master branch and the people owning slaves and thus being slave masters is zero. Otherwise, one would probably soon need a list of banned words that may have been used in the past in "controversial" context so to not offend anyone. But I'm not sure how much of human language will remain at this point.
Zealotux 6y ago
Did they sign a contract with ICE
- truculent 6y ago
  That was GitHub
cmckn 6y ago
I think the default branch name change has been good for the ecosystem; “master” didn’t always make sense for whatever workflow was used, and it was hardcoded all over a bunch of tooling. I think “main” makes more sense, regardless of politics, and this encouraged a lot of software to make the default branch configurable.
- afavour 6y ago
  Agreed. I was interested to read in the article that the master name does indeed originate from master/slave, because that doesn’t map to my mental model of git branching at all. If “main” is a better description and offends fewer people, why not switch? Just seems like opposing a very minor change for the sake of it.
  - rvnx 6y ago
    This will necessarily cause some people to hijack the reference branch by creating one branch called "master" and this branch may be used upstream (e.g. Debian builds) to create packages without approval from the main maintainer (who is committing in "main").
    - afavour 6y ago
      If there are any tools hardcoded to use master then there’s nothing stopping anyone continuing to call their reference branch “master”. These changes don’t even apply to existing repos, just as a default for new ones.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  I’m worried about wokeness but I switched to “main” because I took the cue from Linus and because I figured the cost was (almost) zero and if it marginally improved the happiness of a potential future employee it was easier to do now. In hindsight I agree, it feels like a better choice anyway - quicker to type and it makes sense. Win win. That said my concern is that the “cost was zero” - one of the biggest problems with wokeness is it serves to distract from productive actions rather than sanctimony / tokenism / virtue signalling. Perhaps a symptom of twitter syndrome: virtual likes (easy, simple, shallow) vs real change (hard, messy, compromising). When I start discussing the latest woke language debate, I remember that this pontification is exactly my objection, and that I’d be better off thinking about how I can help people who are poor or homeless or unable to access good schooling, rather than endlessly debating which words to use. There certainly is an opportunity cost, mostly on the political left as it neglects vital issues such as financial inequality, education, health, and deteriorating infrastructure. Perhaps the best thing I could start with is to quit twitter to rid myself of the distraction? I don’t know. Anyone managed to work out how to navigate this?
woudsma 6y ago
That saves two bytes.
- tux3 6y ago
  It does, but somehow I get the idea that your comment doesn't really capture the crux of this debate :)
- hYKdTfpa 6y ago
  This is the best argument for this change.
- joshxyz 6y ago
  But now costs thousands of man hours on extra user friction, e.g. extra commands to rename it to main, mistakenly typing master instead of main, fuck that
oap_bram 6y ago
I for one think it's great that people are willing to make things a little more accessible for more people. If people want to be part of our community of developers I think it's great that these organizations listen to people who might have a problem with certain terminology. Even though I don't have a problem with those terms, I think it's still worth evaluating if they're worth keeping if it makes it harder for someone to be part of our community. Hope more of you feel the same, as I'm getting kind of tired of the "the SJWs are at it again" shtick. There's also legitimate reasons to why these changes are necessary outside of some loud obnoxious screams from certain SJW-like people, that yes, are annoying to hear. Some of the response from our community to "push back against this" is just equally weird, tone deaf and childish however. Say what you want, be we all know we've done silly refactors over smaller things. So don't make this bigger than it should be: it's about making our community bigger by making it easier for people to be part of it!
- hYKdTfpa 6y ago
  >I for one think it's great that people are willing to make things a little more accessible for more people. How does this make anything more accessible for anyone?
  - eli 6y ago
    It evokes slavery and makes some people feel unwelcome. Many other projects have made similar changes to their own repos (eg Go made the same switch) and there has been quite a lot written on the topic if you google around.
  - SquareWheel 6y ago
    Considering you created an account just to post in this thread, and your comments imply a very clear bias, it's rather obvious you're not asking this question in good faith.
    - temporama1 6y ago
      He's probably created an anonymous account because we live in a world where you may well lose your job for even questioning that a _source control branch name_ might offend someone. An opinion that - in the real world - the vast majority agree with.
john_alan 6y ago
We should probably stop referring to nice teeth as straight and white too. Wouldn’t want to offend. If you can’t disambiguate software development from human abuse the problem is your grasp of semantics not society.
- av8avenger 6y ago
  Personally i do not care about the change in the default name of the main / master branch in git. But i totally agree with you on the point that we should be able to differentiate such terms from their meaning in another context. I see how this can offend people but honestly the only thing we'll ever be able to do is change the labels on such things. We're assuming so many of those words to be a defacto standard in IT that they won't die anytime soon.
- pdxandi 6y ago
  This just seems like a wholly childish comment. White and straight seem like good descriptions for teeth. Why do you feel outraged by the conversation around improving technology to be more inclusive?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - john_alan 6y ago
    Because if you apply this equally you can’t use the word “pussy cat”. We have to get real. These problems are real. So tackle them in a real way. Renaming branches in version control is virtue signalling horseshit. Wake up.
    - pdxandi 6y ago
      Why are you so offended?
- ipsocannibal 6y ago
  Unfortunately, its not programmers making these decisions. It's non-technical, marketing, and HR departments that copy and paste the terms from the most recent treatise on wokeness.
eli 6y ago
We made this change for our repos internally a year or two ago. Making it the default is a great step and I hope others follow suit.
truculent 6y ago
Either (1) Default name doesn't have inherent value; therefore, changing the default isn't a big deal (low downside), even if the upside is low (2) "master" is for some reason a better name than "main" I never see the people complaining about this stuff spelling out a reason why it's a bad idea to change (2), and am forced to conclude that we are in scenario (1). It seems to me that opinion is much more divided on the amount of upside in changing the name. But if the downside is virtually non-existent, who cares? If this is important to some people, shouldn't we just listen to them, and move on?
- depr 6y ago
  There is a downside which is all aliases and snippets which assume `master` and no longer work (or work across repositories).
  - detaro 6y ago
    Assuming a repo has not changed a default is kinda broken either way, so if this leads to more fixed software... (had quite a few annoying moments with repos that didn't use master as the main branch for whatever reason (e.g. having "develop" and release-specific branches)) and tools that insisted that had to be what I wanted)
  - truculent 6y ago
    At the risk of being too dismissive - that sounds like incipient tech debt coming due, rather than a new problem entirely (yes, the line between those things is blurred)
  - mjw1007 6y ago
    Web links can break too. A URL that could previously be used to retrieve the most recent version of a document may no longer do so. I've already read one bug report where two people were talking at cross-purposes for a considerable time because one of them was reading a stale version of a proposed standard for this reason. It's hardly the largest cause of «Cool URIs don't change»[1] violations out there, but it's enough to cause some real trouble. [1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
kbd 6y ago
The most unfortunate part of all this churn is that git didn’t provide a way to ask it what a repository’s main branch is named.
- detaro 6y ago
  You can resolve to which branch <remote>/HEAD points? (as far as I understand, local repos don't have a concept of a "main branch", it's only a thing concern remotes and the default branch checked out when cloning them?)
  - kbd 6y ago
    > as far as I understand, local repos don't have a concept of a "main branch" $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in... $ git symbolic-ref --short HEAD main $ git switch --create feature-branch Switched to a new branch 'feature-branch' $ git switch ??? > You can resolve to which branch <remote>/HEAD points? Correct, this is the best way I've found. I have this as a git-alias: main-branch = !basename $(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD) But it doesn't help for local repositories that don't have a remote. And it's ironic to need to use "origin" for that, which is itself a "master/main"-like default remote name.
    - detaro 6y ago
      that's what I mean: "main" is just the automatically created branch so that there is a branch for HEAD to point to in an empty repo. It's not special in any functional way locally. I.e. if I create "develop" and delete "main", locally nothing in git itself will ever miss "main" or needs to be told that "develop" is the primary branch, because that's not a concept locally (afaik). It knows the current branch (HEAD), that's it. So wanting to look it up locally doesn't make sense from gits perspective, although maybe the ability to tag a branch as such would be useful for some tooling, but it would in a way introduce the concept to git, not expose something it hides now.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    This usually works but not all git remotes have a `/HEAD` ref. I think GitHub always does though.
hYKdTfpa 6y ago
This change does no good, it serves only to allow people to virtue signal.
deleted 6y ago
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vshager 6y ago
I wonder if I can use my MainCard [tm] for credit card payments at GitLab. Do they exclude people with main degrees? Chess grand mains? Main painters? And don't get me started on the racist audio recording studios ...
elric 6y ago
I would like to point out that it's perfectly OK to have master/slave relations between computers, hard disks and git branches. The only place where it's problematic is between humans. Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. It's nice to try to be considerate of people who are sensitive to certain issues, but at the same time they would do well to limit their sensitivity to where it's appropriate.
- Shish2k 6y ago
  > Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. I’m afraid this idea is rapidly becoming deprecated - now if a word has multiple meanings, we pick whichever one is most offensive and forget the others (No judgement on whether that’s a good thing or not, I see pros and cons)
- fileeditview 6y ago
  Absolutely.. most people complaining about this seem to want to purge the concept itself.. which is crazy to me. The concept is just that. It is not good or bad if you don't involve any human parties and practise it. It just describes that one or many entities control one or many other entities. Culture has become oversensitive in a bad way. And IMO changing "master" to "main" won't help fight racism at all. It is just some useless showpiece action to render whoever it does as a good person or company.
- ec109685 6y ago
  Master / slave are catch all terms versus more precise ones that represent the exact relationship of two systems.
  - pdxandi 6y ago
    I personally prefer primary/secondary anyway.
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      So do I, but I wouldn't care enough to start a debate about it.
deleted 6y ago
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franky47 6y ago
Since we're talking about naming branches, what are your preferred names for branches ? I like 4-letter names: - `main` points to the last release for libraries (along with tags for history) - `prod` points to production in deployable projects (not libraries) - `next` is the development branch for the next version - `deps` is a temporary branch for dependency updates, squashed and merged regularly onto `next`
- dvdgsng 6y ago
  Good for you that you found something that works for you. But why the random length restrictions to 4 chars, seems kind of outdated? Also, how does using only a "next" branch for development scale for teams (maybe using a fork-based workflow?). While I use a similar approach like yours on my personal projects, I still prefer the widely known and battle proven Git-Flow when working on agile teams: - master - develop (optional) - feature/* - release/* - bugfix/* (optional) - hotfix/*
  - corobo 6y ago
    Git flow doesn't care what you call your branches.
    - dvdgsng 6y ago
      correct, it doesn't, but using a quite common scheme like this makes onboarding and reasoning about git-related issues easier. YMMV.
  - franky47 6y ago
    I use this pattern mostly on solo projects and small OSS libraries, when working with clients in teams there is usually already a convention in place, most often just `master` and `develop`. I've never managed to find use in the "complexity" added by adhering strictly to GitFlow (maybe I'm working in too small teams), I don't find it suited to the continuous delivery method. I still use feature branches and hotfixes though. I much prefer a linear history, and use semantic-release to automate releases via commit message standardisation, which gets rid of the `release/*` pattern.
narven 6y ago
When I think that people are not that stupid, there's always someone that surprises me. What on earth has the name "master" to do with anything? Why dont we remove the word "master" from all languages in the world and make it a tabu to even speak of it. What does master/slave in relation to "hu-mans" has to do with anything else in the world that has the same name? Just the amount of money and work hours done by everyone just to make this completely stupid change and not to mention behing completely stupid, its insane, could feed all the starving people on the world. MY BRANCH WILL ALWAYS BE CALLED MASTER IN ALL THE PROJECTS I CONTROL, TILL THE DAY I DIE. PS: Sometimes I wonder if people actually have work to be done, to take us to the futur and beyond, or they just go to the toilet and come up with these ideas.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Please don't be hysterical. In case you're getting angry at the downvotes, I can tell you why you're getting them. There are only two lines of content in your comment other than tribal affiliation signal. One of them is a factually obviously false statement ("Just the amount of money and work hours done… to make this… change… could feed all the starving people on the world"); one of them is a question answered in the first paragraph of the article ("What on earth has the name "master" to do with anything?").
  - narven 6y ago
    why would I be angry with downvotes? They dont mean anything to me. In the meantime, I just created another repo with branch called... master.
    - stnmtn 6y ago
      Cool man hope you feel extremely badass for doing that!
  - furgooswft13 6y ago
    > One of them is a factually obviously false statement ("Just the amount of money and work hours done… to make this… change… could feed all the starving people on the world") Hyperbole for this one thing to be sure, but the amount of money _and_ time spent in total on the Social Justice Industrial Complex over the past few years could probably have terraformed Mars. What a waste.
phtrivier 6y ago
Sad that the article fails to mention what proportion of people of color are employed by GitLab, how that number is evolving, and what steps they're taking to avoid actual discrimination ; as well as their policies regarding the role of contemporary forced labor in their hardware supply chain. (It's entirely possible they're doing the best they can on those fronts, too.) Such a renaming is clearly a "long hanging fruit", and a way to start a conversation. I can't entirely shake up, though, that though that any minute discussing the naming of git branch repositories is not spent on discussing slavery and racism. Which I'm unfortunately not qualified to do.
av8avenger 6y ago
Are there actually any devs out there that are really offended and feel excluded or worse than others because the default git branch is called master? I work in a fairly small company, but if i think of all the things we'd have to change in our infrastructure to exclude all of those offending words (like Black- and White-Lists), we'd probably be busy for a couple of weeks.
- gher-shyu3i 6y ago
  How is blacklist and whitelist offensive now? It seems that some people have nothing better to do than make trouble for the sake of it.
  - ec109685 6y ago
    It reinforces black is bad and white is good. Also, deny list and allow list are more precise terms anyway.
    - alacombe 6y ago
      Black bad and white good will remain until you feel safer in pitch BLACK night than during daylight. It has nothing to do with American socio-cultural societal illness.
    - totony 6y ago
      >Also, deny list and allow list are more precise terms anyway. Are they? Black/whitelist feels way more natural to me. You can also say things like "blacklisted this ip" instead of "adding to the deny list" or something.
      - tomjakubowski 6y ago
        It's really very easy. "denylisted this IP"
      - ec109685 6y ago
        Add this ip to the deny list.
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nobody0 6y ago
Actually, almost all of our ancestors had been slaves longer or shorter in history regardless of race/country.
- alacombe 6y ago
  It only matter in an American context. Nobody's give a rat fuck about white people enslaving other white people, or black people still enslaving other people in Africa TODAY.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
This is american cultural imperialism. Plaina and simple. I am planning to migrate to Russian or Chinese hosted git alternatives.
- gandalfgreybeer 6y ago
  I am not American so maybe the impact of why it needs to be changed is lost on me. But given the context it’s either a zero or a positive net effect. I, however, can’t imagine switching away from a service that I use to something else based solely on this issue. If it’s not for you but it (tries) to helps others and doesn’t really take anything away from you then it’s a net positive change.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    It's not zero cost, and there's no benefit. Appeasing Marxists is not helping others - it's the Red Terror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
- splix 6y ago
  That's actually an interesting cultural and language difference. Being Russian, I never thought about the offense meaning of the word "master" in English, at least in this context. The reason is that in Russia word "master" ("мастер") means something like "an expert in his field", usually referred to professionals. It seems that it has the same Latin root but evolved into a different meaning. So the Russian meaning is more close to the Italian "Maestro". And for me, that meaning was a good fit for the "master" branch, like it contains something professionally made or finished, and just learned that Americans put different meaning when they were deciding on the branch's name.
  - afiori 6y ago
    Another usage of "maestro" in Italian is in "muro maestro" meaning the "load-bearing wall", which is quite apt for git.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
I see this article is flagged. Really? Can't we even discuss this issue like adults?
- dang 6y ago
  Unfortunately the answer isn't necessarily yes. In this case, though, I think people may be reacting more to the fact that this topic has had dozens of submissions and at least a dozen major discussions in the last year.
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  Outside of a few trolly throwaways, the thread seemed reasonable enough last night. After being unflagged though, it's devolved even further into culture war flaming. It seems to me HN is just not a community suited to discussing topics that are sensitive to some, but not others. We collectively are not very good at putting ourselves in other's shoes. That's something necessary to understanding the context behind decisions like these - or to at least frame them for discussion. Sadly this thread has become just one more battleground for a war with no winners. Hopefully the temperature will lower in time, and productive discussion will become possible again. But we're not there yet, and I suspect the early flaggers recognized that.
Chainloader 6y ago
Hmmm this explain why git push origin master failed for me...
macspoofing 6y ago
Yeah, I get it. It is a necessary change just so you take this of the table and not deal with the sporadic complaints that would come. Keeping the 'master' or 'master-slave' (in context of HA) terms just isn't worth potentially offending someone, or losing a sale, or getting bad press. We changed our verbage a couple years in our product as well just for that reason (Master-Slave to Primary-Secondary). The previous company I worked at (circa 2006) did the same as well after a complaint, so this nomenclature change was happening for a few years now. Meh, whatever. It would be nice if that was the end of it, but it feels like we're now just looking for things to be offended by. For example, I have to admit that the terms 'whitelist'/'blacklist' being labeled as not 'inclusive' caught me by surprise because my brain didn't even make that connection ... at all. I wish we, the global community, didn't all have to pay for America's internal cultural hangups.
- ec109685 6y ago
  The terms whitelist and blacklist aren’t very precise. The better terms allow list, deny list or something that more concretely describes the auth model are actually helpful.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    Sure. The existing terms are a little quirky and you can make the argument that 'allow' and 'deny' lists make more sense ... but come on man, why be obtuse? You know that's not why these terms are being changed.
  - yongjik 6y ago
    The terms "whitelist/blacklist" are no less precise than stack, heap, queue, memory, signal, object, class, instance, process, and so on. They acquired precise meaning not by etymology but by usage. It's silly to argue "Oh you didn't want these terms anyway: they're not precise enough." Well, the whole discussion is made of silly hills not worth dying on, so to speak, so maybe it's par for the course ...
  - snicker7 6y ago
    In 2022: the terms "allowlist" and "denylist" evoke the realization that marginalized groups where and are DENIED privileges afforded to others. You are now cancelled.
smusamashah 6y ago
Light and dark / white and black have been symbols of good and bad from long time, is that racist?
naebother 6y ago
If we must have a struggle-session on this and rename to appease the performative gods, why not just call the default branch, you know, "default"?
- benibela 6y ago
  Yes, this is such a silly Git problem In Mercurial it is always "default", and in SVN one used to use "trunk"
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lamontcg 6y ago
father/son nodes were changed to parent/child long before "wokeness" or "SJWs" or even "PC"
- pimlottc 6y ago
  Was that actually a thing? I’ve only ever heard parent/child. Frankly, using gendered terms here just sounds bizarre.
  - lamontcg 6y ago
    My memory for that kind of thing only goes back to around 1990 and it happened before my time. I think father/son was a 60s/70s-era-ism and it was changed 70s/80s?
darepublic 6y ago
I think it's important for people to resist this senseless exercise in imposing conformity, for its own sake.
deleted 6y ago
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Olumde 6y ago
I'm African and I think these name changes are ludicrous. Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin? Reminds me of something Martin Luther King (MLK) said after he started the second phase of his activism. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had been passed 1964 and 1965 respectively, so MLK started to agitate for economic opportunities and equality. He noted that this would be the harder fight because allowing people to vote costs nothing. It was during this phase of his activism that he was assassinated. Changing the name of your repo means little and is not a substitute for looking deeply at your organization and asking the hard questions. You can call your repo Conan the Barbarian conqueror of all, or master. It doesn't matter to me. Edit Can I just add that IMO overcoming bias can only be achieved by individual effort. No amount of talk about diversity and equality by the company will fix the problem if any persons involved in the hiring process has biases and preferences rooted in ethnicity. If diversity initiatives were sufficient Google would be a more diverse place today. Not faulting them for trying though. My experience: I once interviewed a candidate who was much older than the rest of the team and I could see ageism welling up in me as soon as I met him. I had to consciously blind myself to the age of the candidate and forced myself to consider the him on merit only. Turns out the guy was great, and I agreed with the team that he would be a good hire. All I ask is not to look at the color or my skin but only on what I know. And do not offer me a job that I cannot do just because you want to be diverse.
- Huwyt_Nashi031 6y ago
  Is there any big tech company that doesn't have explicit policies that favour the hiring of non-"male candidates of European and Asian origin"? These are conscious biases that are feverishly pursued and policed. I think you can put that notion to bed.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin?" Speaking of biases, please refrain from lumping us Asians in with whites. Asians had nothing to do with the origins or history of America's race problems.
mokarma 6y ago
Ironically, it'll probably be the Scrum Master that ends up creating a Story to update everything to Main.
- ipsocannibal 6y ago
  Hells no. If this going to be enforced it better be done programmitically on my behalf and if the enforcement tool breaks anything the enforcement team is doing the RCA.
deleted 6y ago
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jdlyga 6y ago
It's also nice because main is less characters and less confusing for new git users.
csense 6y ago
I didn't think of the word "master" being offensive in the context of Git branches until the issue came up a few months ago. Once I became aware that some people are offended by the word "master" in this context, I immediately realized that I was blinded by my privilege, and I will henceforth name my branches with a new social consciousness. That is, I was blinded by intellectual privilege: I had assumed that anyone smart enough to use Git would be smart enough not to care about this. I will continue to name my own branches "master," and I have successfully convinced the organization I work for to do the same. Before, I called branches "master" without any political intention at all. Now, I do so with an express political intention to demonstrate my explicit defiance of the censorious sort of people who insist that I must change my words because you might be offended by them. Being upset about the name "master branch" is a completely ridiculous politicization of technology. I'm thinking of downloading/buying and hoarding every mathematics and computer science textbook and paper I can find that uses the word "binary," since I'm sure they'll be banned soon due to being offensive to trans people, and someone ought to be preserving knowledge for when our society stops this insane witch-hunt and regains its sanity. For posting this comment, I'm sure I'll be accused of being a racist, and stand a real risk of losing some karma. I'm not a racist. The way I interact with people of all races is ethical, and gives me no trouble sleeping at night. I'm glad slavery ended long ago. I'm simply taking a stand, in my own little way, against political correctness run amok.
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Wait until the word 'native' gets added to the list of non-inclusive terms.
- ipsocannibal 6y ago
  Lol, this is actually being discussed at major tech companies and the comment is downvoted. 'Black Friday' is also frowned upon as well.
hakube 6y ago
welcome to the age of cancel culture and snowflakes
mackrevinack 6y ago
its strange that a company with "git" in their name would be worried about offending people
alpineidyll3 6y ago
What if it was never about economic slavery, and computer people are just really into S&M.
mleonhard 6y ago
Some words trigger strong negative emotions for many people. For example, anyone with a loved one who died by suicide can be triggered by the word 'suicide'. They can be working productively and happily, see the word 'suicide' in some code, and then spend the rest of the day suffering. People deserve to work and live without triggering their traumas. Name changes are cheap to implement. For example, we can use 'shutdown' instead of 'suicide' and help our teammates to be more productive and happy. So let's just all do the name changes without complaining or judging the people who ask for them. We'll do it because we care about them. Potential trigger words and suitable alternatives: - suicide, abort -> exit, crash, stop, halt, shutdown, terminate - kill -> stop, halt, shutdown, terminate - infect -> assimilate, convert, install - master -> main, primary, leader - slave -> backup, secondary, follower - blacklist -> denylist, blocklist - whitelist -> allowlist, passlist - daemon, demon -> server, worker - cop -> supervisor, monitor, watchdog - male -> plug, prong, sender - female -> jack, socket, receiver - mate -> connect, link, join - gender-changer -> adapter, socket-to-socket adapter, plug-to-plug adapter
- efiecho 6y ago
  The only right solution is for those people to learn emotion regulation.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    Would you please explain a bit more? Specifically, consider a person who lost a child to suicide. What kind of emotional regulation skill will help them remain happy and productive at work after reading the word 'suicide' in code? Who teaches this skill? What percentage of people are able to learn and use it effectively? How does the cost of learning and relying on the skill compare to the cost of changing some words in our code?
    - efiecho 6y ago
      It's not feasible or reasonable depending on the world catering to your every need. If seeing or hearing a word will result in a mental breakdown, the solution is NOT to demand the entire world stop using that word, but for you to build mental resilience and being able to cope with that word, longterm this is the only way for you to not be miserable.

105 points by ProZsolt 6y ago

gear54rus 6y ago

Another victim of this hysteria. Will surely make a point to switch it back every time I create a repo.

Smaug123 6y ago
Downvoted because sneering dismissal serves no purpose except to make discourse more toxic.
meepmorp 6y ago
You sound more hysterical than they do. How badly does this affect you and your life, really?
- rualca 6y ago
  > You sound more hysterical than they do. How badly does this affect you and your life, really? So much this. Naming things is an arbitrary process, and adopting a default naming suggestion to accommodate someone's sensibilities is something that does not have any negative impact on anyone. At all. To those who are whining about a default naming suggestion: grow up.
deleted 6y ago
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tialaramex 6y ago
See, that would be making yourself a victim of "hysteria". If you just raised an eyebrow and moved on then your claim that it's "hysteria" might have more weight but you'd have less opportunity to grandstand about it. This is also an amusing choice of terminology because of the origin of the word hysteria but I'm going to guess you didn't do that on purpose.
- hYKdTfpa 6y ago
  Do we really have to examine the origin of every word we use rather than according its modern common usage and use in context?
  - truculent 6y ago
    We're not examining every word. This article is about examining a specific word, with a specific history, within a specific context.
    - vshager 6y ago
      In a specific country, whose industry takes free open source labor from all over the world and then imposes its own cultural values. Open source people from other regions provide the majority of code and have no say in political decisions. One might be tempted to say that they are slaves.
      - truculent 6y ago
        > imposes its own cultural values. This is a default. If it offends your sensibilities so much, you can configure it to be something else. Heck, I'd even go as far as suggesting that "main" is a more common word for non-native speakers of english than "master", making it more intuitive for non-US developers.
      - dang 6y ago
        Please don't use HN for political and ideological flamewar, regardless of what you're battling for or against. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    Why are you so invested in something with so very little impact on you?
- gher-shyu3i 6y ago
sinistro25 6y ago
I fell too that this master-slave thing is a overstretch and a little hysteria. That being said, I do think 'main' is a better name for what this branch is supposed to be and it might be better for beginners to understand. Of course, 'master' is the term we are all used to and that will cause a lot of confusion and broken pipelines too.
bovermyer 6y ago
Whether it's called "master" or "main" affects me very little. Whether it's called "master" or "main" affects some people very much. I'm enough of a team player that I'm willing to make the switch to make others more comfortable.
- hYKdTfpa 6y ago
  No, it doesn't affect anyone. It's a perfectly legitimate use of the word.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- vshager 6y ago
  Do you think they'll stop there? Revolutions are perpetual and once you have fed the beast, it comes back for more.
pezezin 6y ago
I did that recently. I had been developing some code for a few months, committing to a local repo, and I finally decided to upload it to GitHub. The local branch was named "master" because that is Git's default, but GitHub decided it should be "main", so the first thing I did after creating the repo was to revert it to "master". Fuck virtue signalling and Twitter keyboard warriors. My parents grew up under an oppressive ultra-catholic dictatorship where they had to pretend to be "good" Christians, and I for sure don't want society to go the same way again.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Adoption of more inclusive terms is hardly "hysteria". This IETF memo^1 makes a rational, compelling case for adopting alternate terms. I encourage you to read it, and try taking a broader, more empathetic view. Pause to consider the weight and connotations of certain words for certain groups of people, before claiming victimhood or accusing others of hysteria. Characterizing the change as "PC Politburo" word-policing strikes me as a shallow, knee-jerk response to a positive change. Fewer characters, less baggage, clearer semantics. What's the harm? 1. https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-04.html https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-04.html
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  Part of taking a broad and empathetic approach is understanding all people's emotions, thoughts and desires without necessarily sympathetiszing with them. Empathy is a pre requisite for agreement, discussion and conflict resolution. What these types of changes show, however is that there is no discussion and the opposition to such change indicates a "lack of empathy" which is a classic othering tactic. That to me is worrying. People should be able to meet in the middle, to negotiate change. These types of change appear to have been done with no real agreement, no meeting in the middle. It appears as if, ironically (and with a bit of exaggeration from me), no empathy outside of the ingroup was used. The reality is no holistic understanding or discussion is required as it's a foregone decision and one where almost everyone in this discussion forum has no say about. We should just get on and live with it.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    "What these types of changes show, however is that there is no discussion and the opposition to such change indicates a "lack of empathy" which is a classic othering tactic." Huh? That's quite a bit further a stretch than any of the "woke" accusations I've received for suggesting a pivot from "master" to "main" might actually be a simple improvement.
amiga-workbench 6y ago
Is it really necessary to change it every time? Github did the same thing last year, I just went into my organisations settings and switched the default back to master.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This sort of provocation is close to trolling. It seriously damages the thread, especially when the topic is provocative. Please don't do it again. There are plenty of ways to make substantive comments on both sides of this question, as other users have demonstrated. Please either do that instead, or (always a fine option) don't post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- alacombe 6y ago
  This all thread is a huge flamewar...
  - dang 6y ago
    It's a matter of degree. If you don't consider that, it leads to a nihilistic "why bother" attitude that actually makes things much worse. Let's inch our way toward something better instead.

rvz 6y ago

Right I should have known that it is Sunday slow news day.

alacombe 6y ago
SV SJW white-knights are getting bored since they got orange man out.

Longhanks 6y ago

I wonder if a master's degree is also offensive.

A12-B 6y ago
Master has multiple definitions, yours is not the same as the one git used.
- Longhanks 6y ago
  Exactly, and gits is not the same one as a slave master.
  - beojan 6y ago
    Turns out it is: > This term came from Bitkeeper, a predecessor to Git. Bitkeeper referred to the source of truth as the "master repository" and other copies as "slave repositories".
    - rjknight 6y ago
      In all of the previous discussions of this topic, I have never seen this simple fact pointed out. To me, this is a definitive argument for changing the name. If the facts had been different, I might have seen the matter differently, but if these are the facts then the name change makes sense.
    - temporama1 6y ago
      Bitkeeper must be punished for these transgressions.
    - Longhanks 6y ago
      Turns out the meaning can change over time. I'm confident the number of people using a master branch and the people owning slaves and thus being slave masters is zero. Otherwise, one would probably soon need a list of banned words that may have been used in the past in "controversial" context so to not offend anyone. But I'm not sure how much of human language will remain at this point.

Zealotux 6y ago

Did they sign a contract with ICE

truculent 6y ago
That was GitHub

cmckn 6y ago

I think the default branch name change has been good for the ecosystem; “master” didn’t always make sense for whatever workflow was used, and it was hardcoded all over a bunch of tooling. I think “main” makes more sense, regardless of politics, and this encouraged a lot of software to make the default branch configurable.

afavour 6y ago
Agreed. I was interested to read in the article that the master name does indeed originate from master/slave, because that doesn’t map to my mental model of git branching at all. If “main” is a better description and offends fewer people, why not switch? Just seems like opposing a very minor change for the sake of it.
- rvnx 6y ago
  This will necessarily cause some people to hijack the reference branch by creating one branch called "master" and this branch may be used upstream (e.g. Debian builds) to create packages without approval from the main maintainer (who is committing in "main").
  - afavour 6y ago
    If there are any tools hardcoded to use master then there’s nothing stopping anyone continuing to call their reference branch “master”. These changes don’t even apply to existing repos, just as a default for new ones.
randomsearch 6y ago
I’m worried about wokeness but I switched to “main” because I took the cue from Linus and because I figured the cost was (almost) zero and if it marginally improved the happiness of a potential future employee it was easier to do now. In hindsight I agree, it feels like a better choice anyway - quicker to type and it makes sense. Win win. That said my concern is that the “cost was zero” - one of the biggest problems with wokeness is it serves to distract from productive actions rather than sanctimony / tokenism / virtue signalling. Perhaps a symptom of twitter syndrome: virtual likes (easy, simple, shallow) vs real change (hard, messy, compromising). When I start discussing the latest woke language debate, I remember that this pontification is exactly my objection, and that I’d be better off thinking about how I can help people who are poor or homeless or unable to access good schooling, rather than endlessly debating which words to use. There certainly is an opportunity cost, mostly on the political left as it neglects vital issues such as financial inequality, education, health, and deteriorating infrastructure. Perhaps the best thing I could start with is to quit twitter to rid myself of the distraction? I don’t know. Anyone managed to work out how to navigate this?

woudsma 6y ago

That saves two bytes.

tux3 6y ago
It does, but somehow I get the idea that your comment doesn't really capture the crux of this debate :)
hYKdTfpa 6y ago
This is the best argument for this change.
joshxyz 6y ago
But now costs thousands of man hours on extra user friction, e.g. extra commands to rename it to main, mistakenly typing master instead of main, fuck that

oap_bram 6y ago

I for one think it's great that people are willing to make things a little more accessible for more people. If people want to be part of our community of developers I think it's great that these organizations listen to people who might have a problem with certain terminology. Even though I don't have a problem with those terms, I think it's still worth evaluating if they're worth keeping if it makes it harder for someone to be part of our community. Hope more of you feel the same, as I'm getting kind of tired of the "the SJWs are at it again" shtick. There's also legitimate reasons to why these changes are necessary outside of some loud obnoxious screams from certain SJW-like people, that yes, are annoying to hear. Some of the response from our community to "push back against this" is just equally weird, tone deaf and childish however. Say what you want, be we all know we've done silly refactors over smaller things. So don't make this bigger than it should be: it's about making our community bigger by making it easier for people to be part of it!

hYKdTfpa 6y ago
>I for one think it's great that people are willing to make things a little more accessible for more people. How does this make anything more accessible for anyone?
- eli 6y ago
  It evokes slavery and makes some people feel unwelcome. Many other projects have made similar changes to their own repos (eg Go made the same switch) and there has been quite a lot written on the topic if you google around.
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  Considering you created an account just to post in this thread, and your comments imply a very clear bias, it's rather obvious you're not asking this question in good faith.
  - temporama1 6y ago
    He's probably created an anonymous account because we live in a world where you may well lose your job for even questioning that a _source control branch name_ might offend someone. An opinion that - in the real world - the vast majority agree with.

john_alan 6y ago

We should probably stop referring to nice teeth as straight and white too. Wouldn’t want to offend. If you can’t disambiguate software development from human abuse the problem is your grasp of semantics not society.

av8avenger 6y ago
Personally i do not care about the change in the default name of the main / master branch in git. But i totally agree with you on the point that we should be able to differentiate such terms from their meaning in another context. I see how this can offend people but honestly the only thing we'll ever be able to do is change the labels on such things. We're assuming so many of those words to be a defacto standard in IT that they won't die anytime soon.
pdxandi 6y ago
This just seems like a wholly childish comment. White and straight seem like good descriptions for teeth. Why do you feel outraged by the conversation around improving technology to be more inclusive?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- john_alan 6y ago
  Because if you apply this equally you can’t use the word “pussy cat”. We have to get real. These problems are real. So tackle them in a real way. Renaming branches in version control is virtue signalling horseshit. Wake up.
  - pdxandi 6y ago
    Why are you so offended?
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Unfortunately, its not programmers making these decisions. It's non-technical, marketing, and HR departments that copy and paste the terms from the most recent treatise on wokeness.

eli 6y ago

We made this change for our repos internally a year or two ago. Making it the default is a great step and I hope others follow suit.

truculent 6y ago

Either (1) Default name doesn't have inherent value; therefore, changing the default isn't a big deal (low downside), even if the upside is low (2) "master" is for some reason a better name than "main" I never see the people complaining about this stuff spelling out a reason why it's a bad idea to change (2), and am forced to conclude that we are in scenario (1). It seems to me that opinion is much more divided on the amount of upside in changing the name. But if the downside is virtually non-existent, who cares? If this is important to some people, shouldn't we just listen to them, and move on?

depr 6y ago
There is a downside which is all aliases and snippets which assume `master` and no longer work (or work across repositories).
- detaro 6y ago
  Assuming a repo has not changed a default is kinda broken either way, so if this leads to more fixed software... (had quite a few annoying moments with repos that didn't use master as the main branch for whatever reason (e.g. having "develop" and release-specific branches)) and tools that insisted that had to be what I wanted)
- truculent 6y ago
  At the risk of being too dismissive - that sounds like incipient tech debt coming due, rather than a new problem entirely (yes, the line between those things is blurred)
- mjw1007 6y ago
  Web links can break too. A URL that could previously be used to retrieve the most recent version of a document may no longer do so. I've already read one bug report where two people were talking at cross-purposes for a considerable time because one of them was reading a stale version of a proposed standard for this reason. It's hardly the largest cause of «Cool URIs don't change»[1] violations out there, but it's enough to cause some real trouble. [1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

kbd 6y ago

The most unfortunate part of all this churn is that git didn’t provide a way to ask it what a repository’s main branch is named.

detaro 6y ago
You can resolve to which branch <remote>/HEAD points? (as far as I understand, local repos don't have a concept of a "main branch", it's only a thing concern remotes and the default branch checked out when cloning them?)
- kbd 6y ago
  > as far as I understand, local repos don't have a concept of a "main branch" $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in... $ git symbolic-ref --short HEAD main $ git switch --create feature-branch Switched to a new branch 'feature-branch' $ git switch ??? > You can resolve to which branch <remote>/HEAD points? Correct, this is the best way I've found. I have this as a git-alias: main-branch = !basename $(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD) But it doesn't help for local repositories that don't have a remote. And it's ironic to need to use "origin" for that, which is itself a "master/main"-like default remote name.
  - detaro 6y ago
    that's what I mean: "main" is just the automatically created branch so that there is a branch for HEAD to point to in an empty repo. It's not special in any functional way locally. I.e. if I create "develop" and delete "main", locally nothing in git itself will ever miss "main" or needs to be told that "develop" is the primary branch, because that's not a concept locally (afaik). It knows the current branch (HEAD), that's it. So wanting to look it up locally doesn't make sense from gits perspective, although maybe the ability to tag a branch as such would be useful for some tooling, but it would in a way introduce the concept to git, not expose something it hides now.
- kevincox 6y ago
  This usually works but not all git remotes have a `/HEAD` ref. I think GitHub always does though.

hYKdTfpa 6y ago

This change does no good, it serves only to allow people to virtue signal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vshager 6y ago

I wonder if I can use my MainCard [tm] for credit card payments at GitLab. Do they exclude people with main degrees? Chess grand mains? Main painters? And don't get me started on the racist audio recording studios ...

elric 6y ago

I would like to point out that it's perfectly OK to have master/slave relations between computers, hard disks and git branches. The only place where it's problematic is between humans. Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. It's nice to try to be considerate of people who are sensitive to certain issues, but at the same time they would do well to limit their sensitivity to where it's appropriate.

Shish2k 6y ago
> Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. I’m afraid this idea is rapidly becoming deprecated - now if a word has multiple meanings, we pick whichever one is most offensive and forget the others (No judgement on whether that’s a good thing or not, I see pros and cons)
fileeditview 6y ago
Absolutely.. most people complaining about this seem to want to purge the concept itself.. which is crazy to me. The concept is just that. It is not good or bad if you don't involve any human parties and practise it. It just describes that one or many entities control one or many other entities. Culture has become oversensitive in a bad way. And IMO changing "master" to "main" won't help fight racism at all. It is just some useless showpiece action to render whoever it does as a good person or company.
ec109685 6y ago
Master / slave are catch all terms versus more precise ones that represent the exact relationship of two systems.
- pdxandi 6y ago
  I personally prefer primary/secondary anyway.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    So do I, but I wouldn't care enough to start a debate about it.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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franky47 6y ago

Since we're talking about naming branches, what are your preferred names for branches ? I like 4-letter names: - `main` points to the last release for libraries (along with tags for history) - `prod` points to production in deployable projects (not libraries) - `next` is the development branch for the next version - `deps` is a temporary branch for dependency updates, squashed and merged regularly onto `next`

dvdgsng 6y ago
Good for you that you found something that works for you. But why the random length restrictions to 4 chars, seems kind of outdated? Also, how does using only a "next" branch for development scale for teams (maybe using a fork-based workflow?). While I use a similar approach like yours on my personal projects, I still prefer the widely known and battle proven Git-Flow when working on agile teams: - master - develop (optional) - feature/* - release/* - bugfix/* (optional) - hotfix/*
- corobo 6y ago
  Git flow doesn't care what you call your branches.
  - dvdgsng 6y ago
    correct, it doesn't, but using a quite common scheme like this makes onboarding and reasoning about git-related issues easier. YMMV.
- franky47 6y ago
  I use this pattern mostly on solo projects and small OSS libraries, when working with clients in teams there is usually already a convention in place, most often just `master` and `develop`. I've never managed to find use in the "complexity" added by adhering strictly to GitFlow (maybe I'm working in too small teams), I don't find it suited to the continuous delivery method. I still use feature branches and hotfixes though. I much prefer a linear history, and use semantic-release to automate releases via commit message standardisation, which gets rid of the `release/*` pattern.

narven 6y ago

When I think that people are not that stupid, there's always someone that surprises me. What on earth has the name "master" to do with anything? Why dont we remove the word "master" from all languages in the world and make it a tabu to even speak of it. What does master/slave in relation to "hu-mans" has to do with anything else in the world that has the same name? Just the amount of money and work hours done by everyone just to make this completely stupid change and not to mention behing completely stupid, its insane, could feed all the starving people on the world. MY BRANCH WILL ALWAYS BE CALLED MASTER IN ALL THE PROJECTS I CONTROL, TILL THE DAY I DIE. PS: Sometimes I wonder if people actually have work to be done, to take us to the futur and beyond, or they just go to the toilet and come up with these ideas.

Smaug123 6y ago
Please don't be hysterical. In case you're getting angry at the downvotes, I can tell you why you're getting them. There are only two lines of content in your comment other than tribal affiliation signal. One of them is a factually obviously false statement ("Just the amount of money and work hours done… to make this… change… could feed all the starving people on the world"); one of them is a question answered in the first paragraph of the article ("What on earth has the name "master" to do with anything?").
- narven 6y ago
  why would I be angry with downvotes? They dont mean anything to me. In the meantime, I just created another repo with branch called... master.
  - stnmtn 6y ago
    Cool man hope you feel extremely badass for doing that!
- furgooswft13 6y ago
  > One of them is a factually obviously false statement ("Just the amount of money and work hours done… to make this… change… could feed all the starving people on the world") Hyperbole for this one thing to be sure, but the amount of money _and_ time spent in total on the Social Justice Industrial Complex over the past few years could probably have terraformed Mars. What a waste.

phtrivier 6y ago

Sad that the article fails to mention what proportion of people of color are employed by GitLab, how that number is evolving, and what steps they're taking to avoid actual discrimination ; as well as their policies regarding the role of contemporary forced labor in their hardware supply chain. (It's entirely possible they're doing the best they can on those fronts, too.) Such a renaming is clearly a "long hanging fruit", and a way to start a conversation. I can't entirely shake up, though, that though that any minute discussing the naming of git branch repositories is not spent on discussing slavery and racism. Which I'm unfortunately not qualified to do.

av8avenger 6y ago

Are there actually any devs out there that are really offended and feel excluded or worse than others because the default git branch is called master? I work in a fairly small company, but if i think of all the things we'd have to change in our infrastructure to exclude all of those offending words (like Black- and White-Lists), we'd probably be busy for a couple of weeks.

gher-shyu3i 6y ago
How is blacklist and whitelist offensive now? It seems that some people have nothing better to do than make trouble for the sake of it.
- ec109685 6y ago
  It reinforces black is bad and white is good. Also, deny list and allow list are more precise terms anyway.
  - alacombe 6y ago
    Black bad and white good will remain until you feel safer in pitch BLACK night than during daylight. It has nothing to do with American socio-cultural societal illness.
  - totony 6y ago
    >Also, deny list and allow list are more precise terms anyway. Are they? Black/whitelist feels way more natural to me. You can also say things like "blacklisted this ip" instead of "adding to the deny list" or something.
    - tomjakubowski 6y ago
      It's really very easy. "denylisted this IP"
    - ec109685 6y ago
      Add this ip to the deny list.

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nobody0 6y ago

Actually, almost all of our ancestors had been slaves longer or shorter in history regardless of race/country.

alacombe 6y ago
It only matter in an American context. Nobody's give a rat fuck about white people enslaving other white people, or black people still enslaving other people in Africa TODAY.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

This is american cultural imperialism. Plaina and simple. I am planning to migrate to Russian or Chinese hosted git alternatives.

gandalfgreybeer 6y ago
I am not American so maybe the impact of why it needs to be changed is lost on me. But given the context it’s either a zero or a positive net effect. I, however, can’t imagine switching away from a service that I use to something else based solely on this issue. If it’s not for you but it (tries) to helps others and doesn’t really take anything away from you then it’s a net positive change.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  It's not zero cost, and there's no benefit. Appeasing Marxists is not helping others - it's the Red Terror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
splix 6y ago
That's actually an interesting cultural and language difference. Being Russian, I never thought about the offense meaning of the word "master" in English, at least in this context. The reason is that in Russia word "master" ("мастер") means something like "an expert in his field", usually referred to professionals. It seems that it has the same Latin root but evolved into a different meaning. So the Russian meaning is more close to the Italian "Maestro". And for me, that meaning was a good fit for the "master" branch, like it contains something professionally made or finished, and just learned that Americans put different meaning when they were deciding on the branch's name.
- afiori 6y ago
  Another usage of "maestro" in Italian is in "muro maestro" meaning the "load-bearing wall", which is quite apt for git.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

I see this article is flagged. Really? Can't we even discuss this issue like adults?

dang 6y ago
Unfortunately the answer isn't necessarily yes. In this case, though, I think people may be reacting more to the fact that this topic has had dozens of submissions and at least a dozen major discussions in the last year.
SquareWheel 6y ago
Outside of a few trolly throwaways, the thread seemed reasonable enough last night. After being unflagged though, it's devolved even further into culture war flaming. It seems to me HN is just not a community suited to discussing topics that are sensitive to some, but not others. We collectively are not very good at putting ourselves in other's shoes. That's something necessary to understanding the context behind decisions like these - or to at least frame them for discussion. Sadly this thread has become just one more battleground for a war with no winners. Hopefully the temperature will lower in time, and productive discussion will become possible again. But we're not there yet, and I suspect the early flaggers recognized that.

Chainloader 6y ago

Hmmm this explain why git push origin master failed for me...

macspoofing 6y ago

Yeah, I get it. It is a necessary change just so you take this of the table and not deal with the sporadic complaints that would come. Keeping the 'master' or 'master-slave' (in context of HA) terms just isn't worth potentially offending someone, or losing a sale, or getting bad press. We changed our verbage a couple years in our product as well just for that reason (Master-Slave to Primary-Secondary). The previous company I worked at (circa 2006) did the same as well after a complaint, so this nomenclature change was happening for a few years now. Meh, whatever. It would be nice if that was the end of it, but it feels like we're now just looking for things to be offended by. For example, I have to admit that the terms 'whitelist'/'blacklist' being labeled as not 'inclusive' caught me by surprise because my brain didn't even make that connection ... at all. I wish we, the global community, didn't all have to pay for America's internal cultural hangups.

ec109685 6y ago
The terms whitelist and blacklist aren’t very precise. The better terms allow list, deny list or something that more concretely describes the auth model are actually helpful.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Sure. The existing terms are a little quirky and you can make the argument that 'allow' and 'deny' lists make more sense ... but come on man, why be obtuse? You know that's not why these terms are being changed.
- yongjik 6y ago
  The terms "whitelist/blacklist" are no less precise than stack, heap, queue, memory, signal, object, class, instance, process, and so on. They acquired precise meaning not by etymology but by usage. It's silly to argue "Oh you didn't want these terms anyway: they're not precise enough." Well, the whole discussion is made of silly hills not worth dying on, so to speak, so maybe it's par for the course ...
- snicker7 6y ago
  In 2022: the terms "allowlist" and "denylist" evoke the realization that marginalized groups where and are DENIED privileges afforded to others. You are now cancelled.

smusamashah 6y ago

Light and dark / white and black have been symbols of good and bad from long time, is that racist?

naebother 6y ago

If we must have a struggle-session on this and rename to appease the performative gods, why not just call the default branch, you know, "default"?

benibela 6y ago
Yes, this is such a silly Git problem In Mercurial it is always "default", and in SVN one used to use "trunk"

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lamontcg 6y ago

father/son nodes were changed to parent/child long before "wokeness" or "SJWs" or even "PC"

pimlottc 6y ago
Was that actually a thing? I’ve only ever heard parent/child. Frankly, using gendered terms here just sounds bizarre.
- lamontcg 6y ago
  My memory for that kind of thing only goes back to around 1990 and it happened before my time. I think father/son was a 60s/70s-era-ism and it was changed 70s/80s?

darepublic 6y ago

I think it's important for people to resist this senseless exercise in imposing conformity, for its own sake.

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Olumde 6y ago

I'm African and I think these name changes are ludicrous. Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin? Reminds me of something Martin Luther King (MLK) said after he started the second phase of his activism. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had been passed 1964 and 1965 respectively, so MLK started to agitate for economic opportunities and equality. He noted that this would be the harder fight because allowing people to vote costs nothing. It was during this phase of his activism that he was assassinated. Changing the name of your repo means little and is not a substitute for looking deeply at your organization and asking the hard questions. You can call your repo Conan the Barbarian conqueror of all, or master. It doesn't matter to me. Edit Can I just add that IMO overcoming bias can only be achieved by individual effort. No amount of talk about diversity and equality by the company will fix the problem if any persons involved in the hiring process has biases and preferences rooted in ethnicity. If diversity initiatives were sufficient Google would be a more diverse place today. Not faulting them for trying though. My experience: I once interviewed a candidate who was much older than the rest of the team and I could see ageism welling up in me as soon as I met him. I had to consciously blind myself to the age of the candidate and forced myself to consider the him on merit only. Turns out the guy was great, and I agreed with the team that he would be a good hire. All I ask is not to look at the color or my skin but only on what I know. And do not offer me a job that I cannot do just because you want to be diverse.

Huwyt_Nashi031 6y ago
Is there any big tech company that doesn't have explicit policies that favour the hiring of non-"male candidates of European and Asian origin"? These are conscious biases that are feverishly pursued and policed. I think you can put that notion to bed.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin?" Speaking of biases, please refrain from lumping us Asians in with whites. Asians had nothing to do with the origins or history of America's race problems.

mokarma 6y ago

Ironically, it'll probably be the Scrum Master that ends up creating a Story to update everything to Main.

ipsocannibal 6y ago
Hells no. If this going to be enforced it better be done programmitically on my behalf and if the enforcement tool breaks anything the enforcement team is doing the RCA.

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jdlyga 6y ago

It's also nice because main is less characters and less confusing for new git users.

csense 6y ago

I didn't think of the word "master" being offensive in the context of Git branches until the issue came up a few months ago. Once I became aware that some people are offended by the word "master" in this context, I immediately realized that I was blinded by my privilege, and I will henceforth name my branches with a new social consciousness. That is, I was blinded by intellectual privilege: I had assumed that anyone smart enough to use Git would be smart enough not to care about this. I will continue to name my own branches "master," and I have successfully convinced the organization I work for to do the same. Before, I called branches "master" without any political intention at all. Now, I do so with an express political intention to demonstrate my explicit defiance of the censorious sort of people who insist that I must change my words because you might be offended by them. Being upset about the name "master branch" is a completely ridiculous politicization of technology. I'm thinking of downloading/buying and hoarding every mathematics and computer science textbook and paper I can find that uses the word "binary," since I'm sure they'll be banned soon due to being offensive to trans people, and someone ought to be preserving knowledge for when our society stops this insane witch-hunt and regains its sanity. For posting this comment, I'm sure I'll be accused of being a racist, and stand a real risk of losing some karma. I'm not a racist. The way I interact with people of all races is ethical, and gives me no trouble sleeping at night. I'm glad slavery ended long ago. I'm simply taking a stand, in my own little way, against political correctness run amok.

ipsocannibal 6y ago

Wait until the word 'native' gets added to the list of non-inclusive terms.

ipsocannibal 6y ago
Lol, this is actually being discussed at major tech companies and the comment is downvoted. 'Black Friday' is also frowned upon as well.

hakube 6y ago

welcome to the age of cancel culture and snowflakes

mackrevinack 6y ago

its strange that a company with "git" in their name would be worried about offending people

alpineidyll3 6y ago

What if it was never about economic slavery, and computer people are just really into S&M.

mleonhard 6y ago

Some words trigger strong negative emotions for many people. For example, anyone with a loved one who died by suicide can be triggered by the word 'suicide'. They can be working productively and happily, see the word 'suicide' in some code, and then spend the rest of the day suffering. People deserve to work and live without triggering their traumas. Name changes are cheap to implement. For example, we can use 'shutdown' instead of 'suicide' and help our teammates to be more productive and happy. So let's just all do the name changes without complaining or judging the people who ask for them. We'll do it because we care about them. Potential trigger words and suitable alternatives: - suicide, abort -> exit, crash, stop, halt, shutdown, terminate - kill -> stop, halt, shutdown, terminate - infect -> assimilate, convert, install - master -> main, primary, leader - slave -> backup, secondary, follower - blacklist -> denylist, blocklist - whitelist -> allowlist, passlist - daemon, demon -> server, worker - cop -> supervisor, monitor, watchdog - male -> plug, prong, sender - female -> jack, socket, receiver - mate -> connect, link, join - gender-changer -> adapter, socket-to-socket adapter, plug-to-plug adapter

efiecho 6y ago
The only right solution is for those people to learn emotion regulation.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Would you please explain a bit more? Specifically, consider a person who lost a child to suicide. What kind of emotional regulation skill will help them remain happy and productive at work after reading the word 'suicide' in code? Who teaches this skill? What percentage of people are able to learn and use it effectively? How does the cost of learning and relying on the skill compare to the cost of changing some words in our code?
  - efiecho 6y ago
    It's not feasible or reasonable depending on the world catering to your every need. If seeing or hearing a word will result in a mental breakdown, the solution is NOT to demand the entire world stop using that word, but for you to build mental resilience and being able to cope with that word, longterm this is the only way for you to not be miserable.