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And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.
by burnte 4mo ago
And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.
- KaiserPro 4mo agoName changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.
- Onavo 4mo agomain vs master
- inigyou 4mo agopersonally my default branch is called dominatrix, just to annoy the kind of person who argues about master
- egypturnash 4mo agoDo you call all your subsidiary branches “paypigs”?
- wiether 4mo agoThe issue has always been with the reasons invoked to make the change Otherwise it would have been smoother
- happymellon 4mo agoYou didn't hear the foaming at the mouth shouting to rename master recordings, master documents, or dub over The Master from Dr. Who. Considering how much effort we had to out into fixing pipelines because of hardcoded scripts, and the lack of good reason to do it its no surprise that it was scoffed at. White keyboard warriors needed to make a change, but couldn't do anything meaningful as it would require actually doing something. At least this change makes sense.
- ChocolateGod 4mo agoI thought the purpose of the rename was to encourage these contributions that apparently weren't happening because of the branch name? It certainly helped GNOME whom was one of the biggest proponents /s
- chadgpt3 4mo agoThe purpose was to make some people feel righteous, which is the purpose of so much human activity.
- fartcoin67 4mo ago[dead]
- otikik 4mo agomainster
- QuercusMax 4mo agough, half the repos at work use main and half use master. Such a pain.
- nh23423fefe 4mo ago[flagged]
- QuercusMax 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nh23423fefe 4mo agolol bigotry isnt real
- QuercusMax 4mo agoBigotry is obviously real, what are you smoking? Plenty of bigots out there.
- lelanthran 4mo ago> What does "master" mean in a DVCS anyway? It's the path you're following. "Following in the path of the master" sounds like a movie I'd watch. "Following in the path of the main", not so much. YMMV :-)
- tadfisher 4mo agoOr the defaults changed, but you are free to lash out.
- inigyou 4mo agoYet name changes happen easily when legally forced. Wireshark, MariaDB, and LibreOffice.
- 12_throw_away 4mo agoSo, um, the phrase "legally forced" really does not go with "happened easily". Ignoring what "legally" forced entails, and just focusing on the mechanics of renaming stuff: Even if your code base can be updated with a simple "s/old/new/" regex (and, IME, this never, ever works as well as you thought it would, and always creates a long tail of manual grepping and editing), you still have to fix the docs, deal with breaking API changes, support multiple versions, provide upgrade paths, deal with confused users, etc. etc. etc. And, um, confusingly, the examples you cite are actually even more complicated and work-intensive than what is being talked about in this article, because they also require URL / domain name updates, legal document changes, regulatory filings, etc. etc. TLDR: the contention that "name changes happen easily" is not an accurate description of the situations you are citing.
- geraldcombs 3mo agoCan confirm. Renaming Ethereal to Wireshark involved a bunch of code and documentation updates, registering word and design trademarks across jurisdictions, and in our case we didn't have control over the old domain, so I had to contact a bunch of people linking to ethereal.com and ask them to link to wireshark.org instead. I don't know if the last part would even be possible today.
- __mharrison__ 4mo agoSecond hardest thing in CS besides cache invalidation and off by one errors....
- xenophonf 4mo agoDon't concurrency. forget about
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoTrue nerds name things properly in the first place. The liberal use of -wacom throughout project names and repositories is a consequence of the Wacom itch being scratched - and then that scratch becoming the base upon which Wacoms' competitors can participate. A true nerd would've skipped including the brand in a directory name, in the first place .. I bet these drivers started off being written by graphics designers, not nerds.
- burnte 4mo agoYes, I know, but that all just underscores what I said about it being emotional. Logically it's not only Wacom but for any tablet. It would do better with a new name as other competitors would help. But the emotional resistance to changing the name keeps those logical improvements form happening.
- weaksauce 4mo agojust change the name to mocaW
- myrmidon 4mo agoNot necessarily. The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
- shermantanktop 4mo agoThat’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example. It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.
- burnte 4mo agoI would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons. "It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.
- ffaccount2 4mo ago>"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? So there's no point in wasting time on this, if perceived problems are low or nonexistent. Current maintainers probably look at it from a technical pov "it's just a name, who cares"
- nine_k 4mo ago> it's just a name, who cares This cannot be, naming things is one of the two canonical hard problems.
- 4mo ago
- jrm4 4mo agoPreach. And it's a disease. Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
- pmontra 4mo agoIn non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me. It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
- jrm4 4mo agoI've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point. To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?" An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."
- ffaccount2 4mo agoNobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects). It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.
- jrm4 4mo agoI don't know why people keep making this point as if it matters; it sounds like you might be trying to absolve the creators or something. But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny. They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.