6 ms·

Honest to God not something I care about but: this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for “master”. I do know some people _did_ care about the name. Sometime

by moomin 11mo ago

Honest to God not something I care about but: this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for “master”. I do know some people _did_ care about the name. Sometimes surprisingly senior people who never supported a tech upgrade want the name changed. In any event, it’s done, “main” won, it’s fine, let’s move on.

matt-attack 11mo ago
Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves. I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo. Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.
- dzhiurgis 11mo ago
  Makes sense when you release 3.0 and basically allowed to introduce breaking changes. In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.
- atoav 11mo ago
  I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part. As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception. As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions: 1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech. 2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage. Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
- input_sh 11mo ago
  That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to. At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
- patchymcnoodles 11mo ago
  That "waste" of resources was absolutely tiny. Took me just some minutes. And I didn't do it because of DEI, just because I think it's a better name.
  - kstrauser 11mo ago
    Same for me, but kind of because of DEI. Basically, it offended some people, and even if I thought it was a little overblown, it took about 2 minutes to change the default name of future repos to be something else (which was at least as good, and perhaps better). It made some people happier at approximately zero cost to myself, so why not.
    - mock-possum 11mo ago
      Yeah that’s how I feel about most progressive stuff - sure it might not bother me, but also changing doesn’t bother me either. It costs you so little to accommodate other people.
      - rurp 11mo ago
        I used to feel that way up until about a year ago. At worst I would roll my eyes at the silliness and then move on, because this stuff rarely matters much one way or another. But then the 2024 elections happened, along with a bunch of exit polls, voter interviews, and other data showing that a surprising (to me anyway) number of people hate this kind of virtue signalling to the point that it can sway their vote. It's very possible those swung votes have ushered in a host of harmful changes that I think do matter a great deal. So now I'm sick of this stuff, it's not only a waste of time it's actively harmful.
        kstrauser 11mo ago
        I’d like to see a study showing 1) people aware of this issue and 2) for whom it swung their vote to the right. That’d have to be, what, 10 complete idiots? “Well, I was going to vote for A, but some of B’s supporters asked if I would please be considerate, and that’s a bridge too far.”
- p0w3n3d 11mo ago
  Every time I push to master I get this song in my head Master! Master! Every time I push to main I have in my head: ...meh
  - weebull 11mo ago
    Master of Puppets -- Metallica To be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.
    - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
      I heard that it's about drugs controlling you
- Gibbon1 11mo ago
  This stuff reminds me of what my mother said about feminists trying to get people to spell women with a y. She didn't like it because it made feminism seem like something petty and frivolous. If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
- fuckinpuppers 11mo ago
  Yeah, I mean, isn’t a masters degree even worse, then?
  - em-bee 11mo ago
    a masters degree is about mastery, not about being central/main/leading...
    - john-h-k 11mo ago
      Masters degree is from “magister”, meaning director/chief/boss/leader
      - em-bee 11mo ago
        wikipedia says: The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone who had been admitted to the rank (degree) of master (i.e. teacher) and from Latin: magister, "teacher" teaching requires mastery, not leadership, although the concepts are related because mastery is also good for leadership. my armchair etymology suggests that master and mastery were closely related until it started to be applied to leadership as well.
        john-h-k 11mo ago
        Magister means teacher and the things I mentioned. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin
  - kread 11mo ago
    Now I just know why I couldn't get a job. It's because I got a bad and worse degree for two years
- AdhemarVandamme 11mo ago
  In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold. I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.” <https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2006/05-1056.pdf#page=40 https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>
  - em-bee 11mo ago
    what, the golden ratio is not made of gold? have we been betrayed all this time?
    - ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago
      Wait until you hear about showers
      - em-bee 11mo ago
        you mean, like baby showers? yeah, totally not what i expected...
    - triceratops 11mo ago
      The golden rule would deform pretty quickly be useless for measurement.
- lucyjojo 11mo ago
  you can call your branch whatever name you want. nobody cares, nobody is stopping you.
  - xedrac 11mo ago
    That was true before the 3.0 release. Why didn't the people offended by "master" just change the branch name? Because it was never about their own branch names. It was about everyone else's.
- StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
  > Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves. I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else. We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one. Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either. Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.
- fastasucan 11mo ago
  I dont know, for me main makes more sense so I prefer main. The main branch isn't master of anything, but its the main branch.
  - thunky 11mo ago
    > The main branch isn't master of anything It's master as in "master copy": A "master copy" is an original version of a work from which other copies are made, serving as the definitive or controlling version
    - snapplebobapple 11mo ago
      Yah, they are losing something with the name change that they don't even understand because they apparently don't understand the intricacies of English. We would be better off changing it to "Gucci Mane" then we could tag our branches off Gucci's hit singles.It only makes slightly less sense than switching to "main"
    - stephenr 11mo ago
      That would make perfect sense if all branches had to be made from the default branch. But they don't. At `$CLIENT` we use `stable` as the default branch. Use whatever works for you. Getting upset about a default that you can change is like getting upset about the default wallpaper of your OS. And before you get all persnickety about that argument working both ways: the developers of git, get to decide the defaults and they did. If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right?
      - thunky 11mo ago
        > If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right? No idea how you got that impression from my comment. It sounds like you're the one that's upset. I don't care what you name your branches. I do think it's dumb to tell other people what (not) to name their branch though. But definitely not something I feel compelled to rearrange my life over.
theshrike79 11mo ago
It's one of those things I couldn't care less about what it's actually called as long as it's uniform everywhere. I had a few frustrated evenings of debugging when Github changed the default to main and my local scripts expected "master". All fixed now, but still an annoyance. Don't think about it much anymore.
- WorldMaker 11mo ago
  Some of your scripts could possibly use `origin/HEAD` and reflect whatever origin thinks is the default branch. (Though obviously that assumes you always have an `origin` remote or something remote-like.) Including using the commit referenced by `origin/HEAD` to find the `origin/{branch-name}` that matches if you want a name to check locally.
_jzlw 11mo ago
PSA: You can run one git command and ignore this change and associated drama entirely. I don't care which you prefer, but let's not pretend like main "won" when sticking with master is as easy as: git config --global init.defaultBranch master
- throwawaymobule 11mo ago
  I did this the first time git asked me, because getting asked every time would get annoying. Glad it's going back to having a default and not asking.
- richid 11mo ago
  main won
- croon 11mo ago
  To be fair, ignoring the drama is just adapting to changes, which is crucial in this field. Our old repo defaulted to master, our new ones defaulted to main. No time was spent on bike shedding.
  - LexiMax 11mo ago
    This has been the case on nearly every open source and proprietary project, I have worked on. Most people do not care and will stick with the old default on old projects and use the new default on new projects. Occasionally, it stokes conversations around possible third options that are more descriptive like stable or development, but the norm is to just go with the default. Going out of your way to set the default to the old name really reeks to me of slacktivism. People probably think that they're taking a stand, but in actual fact others will just assume that your repository is older or that you have an old configuration.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- OCTAGRAM 11mo ago
  git config --global init.defaultBranch default Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway
matheusmoreira 11mo ago
Not at all. This is just about defaults. People can still choose arbitrary branch names. People can still set the default branch name, as I have: [init] defaultBranch = master I just think "master" is an awesome word. Master record. Mastering. It just sounds cool to me and I'm gonna keep using it. I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.
- unwind 11mo ago
  Tip: the next time you need to name a function, don't use "a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything". That's not how you're supposed to name stuff in programming. :)
  - marginalia_nu 11mo ago
    In that case, I think 'git' is probably the name we should have been looking to replace...
  - matheusmoreira 11mo ago
    It's hard when compilers force you to use "main". int main(int argc, char **argv); I once wrote a liblinux library for Linux software development with freestading C. One of the things I did was replace the "main" function with a "liblinux_start" function.
    - OCTAGRAM 11mo ago
      Ada compiler does not force to use main
    - 1718627440 11mo ago
      That's just the default. Nobody stops you from specifying `gcc -Wl,--entry,foo`.
      - matheusmoreira 11mo ago
        Standard C stops you. The C standard library is hardcoded to call the main function. Providing one's own ELF entry point also breaks libc initialization unless the exact same startfiles are used. Freestanding C gets rid of the libc so that's not a problem.

by moomin 11mo ago

matt-attack 11mo ago

Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves. I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo. Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.

dzhiurgis 11mo ago
Makes sense when you release 3.0 and basically allowed to introduce breaking changes. In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.
atoav 11mo ago
I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part. As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception. As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions: 1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech. 2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage. Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
input_sh 11mo ago
That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to. At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
patchymcnoodles 11mo ago
That "waste" of resources was absolutely tiny. Took me just some minutes. And I didn't do it because of DEI, just because I think it's a better name.
- kstrauser 11mo ago
  Same for me, but kind of because of DEI. Basically, it offended some people, and even if I thought it was a little overblown, it took about 2 minutes to change the default name of future repos to be something else (which was at least as good, and perhaps better). It made some people happier at approximately zero cost to myself, so why not.
  - mock-possum 11mo ago
    Yeah that’s how I feel about most progressive stuff - sure it might not bother me, but also changing doesn’t bother me either. It costs you so little to accommodate other people.
    - rurp 11mo ago
      I used to feel that way up until about a year ago. At worst I would roll my eyes at the silliness and then move on, because this stuff rarely matters much one way or another. But then the 2024 elections happened, along with a bunch of exit polls, voter interviews, and other data showing that a surprising (to me anyway) number of people hate this kind of virtue signalling to the point that it can sway their vote. It's very possible those swung votes have ushered in a host of harmful changes that I think do matter a great deal. So now I'm sick of this stuff, it's not only a waste of time it's actively harmful.
      - kstrauser 11mo ago
        I’d like to see a study showing 1) people aware of this issue and 2) for whom it swung their vote to the right. That’d have to be, what, 10 complete idiots? “Well, I was going to vote for A, but some of B’s supporters asked if I would please be considerate, and that’s a bridge too far.”
p0w3n3d 11mo ago
Every time I push to master I get this song in my head Master! Master! Every time I push to main I have in my head: ...meh
- weebull 11mo ago
  Master of Puppets -- Metallica To be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.
  - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
    I heard that it's about drugs controlling you
Gibbon1 11mo ago
This stuff reminds me of what my mother said about feminists trying to get people to spell women with a y. She didn't like it because it made feminism seem like something petty and frivolous. If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
fuckinpuppers 11mo ago
Yeah, I mean, isn’t a masters degree even worse, then?
- em-bee 11mo ago
  a masters degree is about mastery, not about being central/main/leading...
  - john-h-k 11mo ago
    Masters degree is from “magister”, meaning director/chief/boss/leader
    - em-bee 11mo ago
      wikipedia says: The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone who had been admitted to the rank (degree) of master (i.e. teacher) and from Latin: magister, "teacher" teaching requires mastery, not leadership, although the concepts are related because mastery is also good for leadership. my armchair etymology suggests that master and mastery were closely related until it started to be applied to leadership as well.
      - john-h-k 11mo ago
        Magister means teacher and the things I mentioned. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin
- kread 11mo ago
  Now I just know why I couldn't get a job. It's because I got a bad and worse degree for two years
AdhemarVandamme 11mo ago
In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold. I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.” <https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2006/05-1056.pdf#page=40 https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>
- em-bee 11mo ago
  what, the golden ratio is not made of gold? have we been betrayed all this time?
  - ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago
    Wait until you hear about showers
    - em-bee 11mo ago
      you mean, like baby showers? yeah, totally not what i expected...
  - triceratops 11mo ago
    The golden rule would deform pretty quickly be useless for measurement.
lucyjojo 11mo ago
you can call your branch whatever name you want. nobody cares, nobody is stopping you.
- xedrac 11mo ago
  That was true before the 3.0 release. Why didn't the people offended by "master" just change the branch name? Because it was never about their own branch names. It was about everyone else's.
StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
> Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves. I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else. We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one. Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either. Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.
fastasucan 11mo ago
I dont know, for me main makes more sense so I prefer main. The main branch isn't master of anything, but its the main branch.
- thunky 11mo ago
  > The main branch isn't master of anything It's master as in "master copy": A "master copy" is an original version of a work from which other copies are made, serving as the definitive or controlling version
  - snapplebobapple 11mo ago
    Yah, they are losing something with the name change that they don't even understand because they apparently don't understand the intricacies of English. We would be better off changing it to "Gucci Mane" then we could tag our branches off Gucci's hit singles.It only makes slightly less sense than switching to "main"
  - stephenr 11mo ago
    That would make perfect sense if all branches had to be made from the default branch. But they don't. At `$CLIENT` we use `stable` as the default branch. Use whatever works for you. Getting upset about a default that you can change is like getting upset about the default wallpaper of your OS. And before you get all persnickety about that argument working both ways: the developers of git, get to decide the defaults and they did. If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right?
    - thunky 11mo ago
      > If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right? No idea how you got that impression from my comment. It sounds like you're the one that's upset. I don't care what you name your branches. I do think it's dumb to tell other people what (not) to name their branch though. But definitely not something I feel compelled to rearrange my life over.

theshrike79 11mo ago

It's one of those things I couldn't care less about what it's actually called as long as it's uniform everywhere. I had a few frustrated evenings of debugging when Github changed the default to main and my local scripts expected "master". All fixed now, but still an annoyance. Don't think about it much anymore.

WorldMaker 11mo ago
Some of your scripts could possibly use `origin/HEAD` and reflect whatever origin thinks is the default branch. (Though obviously that assumes you always have an `origin` remote or something remote-like.) Including using the commit referenced by `origin/HEAD` to find the `origin/{branch-name}` that matches if you want a name to check locally.

_jzlw 11mo ago

PSA: You can run one git command and ignore this change and associated drama entirely. I don't care which you prefer, but let's not pretend like main "won" when sticking with master is as easy as: git config --global init.defaultBranch master

throwawaymobule 11mo ago
I did this the first time git asked me, because getting asked every time would get annoying. Glad it's going back to having a default and not asking.
richid 11mo ago
main won
croon 11mo ago
To be fair, ignoring the drama is just adapting to changes, which is crucial in this field. Our old repo defaulted to master, our new ones defaulted to main. No time was spent on bike shedding.
- LexiMax 11mo ago
  This has been the case on nearly every open source and proprietary project, I have worked on. Most people do not care and will stick with the old default on old projects and use the new default on new projects. Occasionally, it stokes conversations around possible third options that are more descriptive like stable or development, but the norm is to just go with the default. Going out of your way to set the default to the old name really reeks to me of slacktivism. People probably think that they're taking a stand, but in actual fact others will just assume that your repository is older or that you have an old configuration.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
OCTAGRAM 11mo ago
git config --global init.defaultBranch default Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway

matheusmoreira 11mo ago

Not at all. This is just about defaults. People can still choose arbitrary branch names. People can still set the default branch name, as I have: [init] defaultBranch = master I just think "master" is an awesome word. Master record. Mastering. It just sounds cool to me and I'm gonna keep using it. I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.

unwind 11mo ago
Tip: the next time you need to name a function, don't use "a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything". That's not how you're supposed to name stuff in programming. :)
- marginalia_nu 11mo ago
  In that case, I think 'git' is probably the name we should have been looking to replace...
- matheusmoreira 11mo ago
  It's hard when compilers force you to use "main". int main(int argc, char **argv); I once wrote a liblinux library for Linux software development with freestading C. One of the things I did was replace the "main" function with a "liblinux_start" function.
  - OCTAGRAM 11mo ago
    Ada compiler does not force to use main
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    That's just the default. Nobody stops you from specifying `gcc -Wl,--entry,foo`.
    - matheusmoreira 11mo ago
      Standard C stops you. The C standard library is hardcoded to call the main function. Providing one's own ELF entry point also breaks libc initialization unless the exact same startfiles are used. Freestanding C gets rid of the libc so that's not a problem.