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Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than wh

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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.

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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.