I'm a strong supporter of social justice. I don't really object to people putting in work to change language like that if they think it's important. Especially when the work required is minimal.<p>That said, this is slightly ridiculous. Have customers seriously complained about the term "master"? And my impression was that the usage was more similar to "master copy" than "master of the plantation".<p>Honestly, it's frustrating to me that companies are willing to take token actions like this that are almost completely irrelevant in the scheme of things but unwilling to lose profit by, for example, not contracting with ICE. Actions like this feels like veiled advertising, even when, as I'm sure is true in this case, there are genuine motives behind them. It seems like the structure of corporations allows only the genuine intentions that require little sacrifice to be acted upon.<p>It's a stupid subject to have a flame war over, but I don't understand the logic at all.
As a black person, speaking just for myself, I really do not get the issue around semantics like this. The word "Master" is not synonymous with any race and so does not make me (or anyone I know) uncomfortable. The concept of masters (and slaves) exist and are useful metaphors for naming similar phenomenon. I would much rather focus on issues that make people truly less comfortable in technology, like hiring or sponsoring practices in organizations. If there truly are (black) people offended by this nomenclature, I would not oppose changing it but I honestly don't know any.
This is just so damn pointless. It will cause some "great" controversy, people will be called white supremacists for refusing to stop saying master.<p>Now even if this catches on, then yeah OK I'll start naming my branches as main unless I want to make a political statement, which would just add to confusion when developing.<p>Meanwhile these people will pat each other on the back, yell "yeah! We sure made a difference." while black people keep getting fucked by the system and their lives don't get improved one iota.<p>just... why?
Using the term master doesn't bother me - in my opinion the idea of the master/slave dynamic is much less problematic when you're talking in the context of bits and bytes flicking up and down on some silicon. Having said that, if it bothers people, change it. I do suspect to a certain extent though that people are more interested in changing it because they're worried it might be offensive to other people than actually finding it offensive themselves.<p>The follow up tweet from the original reqeustor is:<p>> 1. “Main” is shorter! Yay brevity!<p>> 2. It’s even easier to remember, tbh<p>> 3. If it makes any of my teammates feel an ounce more comfortable, let’s do it!<p>> 4. If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the tech community, feels like a no brainer to me!<p>1 - Not sure that's an important reason, why not change it to just "M"?<p>2 - Not for people who are already using git and have lived their entire lives on master (or for those more considerate developers, have lived their entire lives PRing into master)<p>3 & 4 - This is what I'm talking about, is there <i>anyone</i> who is actually feeling isolated and uncomfortable, or are there just a load of white people who have focused on literally the most unimportant aspect of being a black person in the tech community?
What bugs me about crap like this is that it ignores world history, makes these people feel good about doing nothing of consequence, and takes attention away from things that will actually help.<p>If you are going to help, actually do something that improves the lives of people. Maybe, you should really put some effort into beefing up the Computer Science programs in black high schools and colleges? You are Microsoft, and had a damn policy of only hiring people from certain schools for certain job areas. In 90, one of your damn reps told a classroom of students that they were only good for "help desk" positions because of the school they went to. I'm betting some all black colleges were not on the hire list for actual developer jobs.<p>Actually doing something useful is hard, this is just signalling how cool you are.
I really don't care what the default name for a branch is. I don't care if people want to change it. Hell, if GitHub starts defaulting to "main" instead of "master" I probably won't even care enough to change it from "main" to anything else in any new repos.<p>What I care about is that this will inevitably lead to companies and individuals that, for any reason (due to having the name "master" hardcoded in a lot of scripts, for instance), do <i>not</i> make this change in their repositories being labeled as being pro-racism.<p>We all know how this goes.<p>This insanity just grows every single day. The purity policing grows ever more intense. It's making my world view bleaker by the minute.
“Waiting for protests at universities to change the Masters degree to Main degree.” Cracked me up.<p>I’ve never considered “master” branch anything odd, saying “master copy” makes sense. What about music? “Remastering” something... or the terminology around mastering a skill?<p>Things are a bit out of control. As people say if you look at that term and the first thought is race related that’s on you.<p>I could see a desire to remove the word “slave” from any replication business. Since the “s” word is directly loaded. But the “m” word has many other definitions outside of that.
These kind of requests are super US-centric without any regards to the rest of the world.<p>I understand these things stem from a place of discomfort with the racial crisis in the US - and I applaud the intentions.<p>However, these requests are not inclusive to:<p>- The foreigner in your team trying to think and communicate in English, while tip-toeing around whatever was deemed offensive this week on Twitter.<p>- The developer in Botswana trying to keep up with this week's terminology changes as dictated by Twitter influencers in the US.<p>I dread the day when someone gets in trouble for saying "Hey guys, I added the URL in the whitelist and pushed it to master"
I support changing master - slave.<p>But the use of master here is from 5 b: an original from which copies can be made
especially : a master recording (such as a magnetic tape)<p>There is no implied slave.<p>It's derived from masterpiece. Something that a master craftsman has created.<p>Master has many definitions and usages. Master of a slave is only one minor usage.<p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master</a>
Nobody cares about the black slave auctions going on in Libya RIGHT NOW. But we are going to remove the word master from our software because it offends people whose ancestors were slaves generations ago.
Honest question: are there people out there who are legitimately uncomfortable/upset about the usage of the terms "master" and "slave" in the context of technology? Or is this more so people trying to be too socially "woke" and assuming something to be offensive when it is not?<p>Master/slave are pretty commonly used terms whenever we talk about things like distributed systems and communication buses. Essentially everywhere that one process, controller, computer, etc. is meant to have authority or control over some other entity or entities, this is often described as a master-slave relationship.
"main" does seem like an objectively better word to use. The definition fits better in almost every use case.<p>May seem like a silly gesture to some, but imagine feeling an emotional trigger every time you had to use a basic tool for your job. That'd piss me off.
put more time into rebuilding the communities in which you physically reside than into bikeshedding quick symbolic actions to numb your conscience.<p>donate the cash equivalent to the engineering hours required to make and test this name change to BLM instead, and get something of actual consequence done.<p><i>Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?</i>
It's a self censoring in western.
It's anti-intellect.
It happened and is happening in China.
The result is a small group shuts up everyone. They could tag everything they don't like and stop using it, e.g. winnie.
Please don't let it happen.
I kind of get it, there's no real reason the default branch should be named master, but where do we stop? Will everyone with a master's degree have to update their resumes?
I think what really bugs me about shit like this is it's just make-work. It's easy, mindless, and completely pointless work that is going to make some people feel like they've actually accomplished something. There are real problems in the world right now. This is not one of them.
It's an old one, but relevant to the topic:
Antirez from Redis wrote a blog article on this topic (demands to change master-slave terminology in Redis sources) roughly 2 years ago, <a href="http://antirez.com/news/122" rel="nofollow">http://antirez.com/news/122</a>.
Newspeak, book burnings next Thursday. Can't have those idioms any more.<p>edit: not to mention 30 years of:<p>if branch in ['master', 'main'] ...
Making these words disappear is a disservice to fighting racism (and other culturally ingrained inequality.)<p>To address systemic racism, we need to change people's preconceptions and prejudices. These are things that are picked up and learned from other people in one's environment. Removing these words makes them even more intangible than they already are.<p>Creating prejudice is easy to communicate. Removing it, on the other hand, is an "absence" of something, which is much harder to get across linguistically, semantically and emotionally.
Personally I think this is a mistake. As we all know, English words have context, the meaning is adaptive depending on the situation. "master" branch has precedent, we have trained our brains to think about "rebasing onto master". This small change will be disruptive, forcing us to unlearn existing, common phrases. Whitelist & blacklist I support discontinuing, however master is a homonym so doesn't have the same obvious connotations.
Just wondering.<p>Unless git changes its default branch name to something else, isn't Github's approach futile?<p>When you "git init", git creates the master branch locally.<p>And then when you push, I sincerely hope GitHub wouldn't somehow rename that branch to something else...
If it helps normalise the removal of problematic terminology in tech then this feels like a positive thing. Software development has a troubling history of being an overwhelmingly straight, white, male space, ridding ourselves of terminology that causes friction to new developers who don't fit the standard model has got to be a good thing.<p>I'm certain that most people would see renaming master to main as fairly benign. However. if a company like Github can be open to making a change like this, even if it is purely symbolic, it sends a message that changes to the status quo are possible.<p>I've also seen some comments complain about the technical difficulty of this change. If this forces developers to put some effort into updating tools that are hardcoded to refer to the primary branch as master then it's good from a purely technical perspective. Especially to help those of us following trunk-based development who already refer it as the trunk.
The terms "master" and "slave" are part of standard vocabulary for those who work around hardware. I wonder what would become of them.
One of the other submissions relating to this became flagged for some reason: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526311" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526311</a><p>I don't often comment on things, but this seems like a slippery slope and a process that I'd like to counteract in some way, so input/comments are welcome. Original comment copied below:<p>I'd prefer it if things didn't change, including the master/slave terminology (the 'master' branch doesn't even have a 'slave' in git...)<p>Have the words themselves become bad to use? It seems that this is a USA centric view anyway with its history (and even then it seems ridiculous--why can't these things be compartmentalised as technical terms?)<p>Slavery certainly still exists in the world, and has existed in most places at some point. Should we rename 'slavery' to something else too while we're at it? Or forget it exists and existed?<p>Certainly certain terms become antiquated over time, like the vocabulary used in Emacs (yank/buffer/etc vs cut/window/tab/...), but master/slave doesn't seem to be there yet.<p>I wonder if there's some way to counteract this newspeak stuff? I think it's harmful that these things happen for such frivolous reasons. Does one just have to be as loud as the minority that drives these things, to counteract it?
Why no one is addressing the biggest problem about programming: separating bits to 0s and 1s. Not only that, but also 0s have no value unless they are led by 1.<p>This is outrageous!
If we want we <i>could</i> remove "master" from everyday usage:<p>master branch/copy - that's your <i>main</i> or <i>primary</i><p>master degree - is now an <i>expert</i> degree<p>martial arts master - congratulations, you're a <i>guru</i>!<p>master bedroom - is now your <i>main</i>, <i>great</i> or <i>grand</i> bedroom (in fact it used to be called the main bedroom not that long ago)<p>skill mastery - you <i>quashed</i> it!<p><i>Should</i> we make these changes? I don't know, I'm a white guy. What I <i>do</i> know is it's time to put an end to systemic racism. If making these seemingly small changes are enough to change people's worldview in a meaningful way then I think we should explore it. There's potentially a lot to gain for such seemingly trivial and small changes in word usage.
Why not this first?<p>Microsoft's shareholders, during last Dec's meeting, rejected Arjuna Capital's proposal that a report be compiled on the gender pay gap across Microsoft, specifically to include "the percentage global median pay gap between male and female employees across race and ethnicity, including base, bonus and equity compensation."<p><a href="https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-04-microsoft-shareholders-reject-call-for-gender-pay-gap-report" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-04-microsoft-...</a>
This makes me sad. The only thing I can do in a case like that is to ABANDON every tool (having a replacement) whenever the company / group behind it starts to drift from the core idea toward strange waters having nothing to do with the objectives of that group... I urge you to do the same. Consider that personal integrity (calling a scam a scam is a matter of honor) is a crucial factor in being in a good relationship with oneself. Let's not accept immaturity as a new norm. Let's slowly and methodically make unfit ideas die, like evolution does. Peace.
PS: I never thought that I 'll live thru that kind of crap from tech industry on a large scale.
PS2: Think what would happen if evolution would be so easy on its creatures, leaving partially-sound ideas as blueprints for the humanity to deal with. You eat an apple, and you crash your teeth on an unexpected brick of gold inside of it. What? Although gold is precious, a bar of gold found that way is a misery. And it makes the existence of that kind of apple just... Inelegant. Wise nature doesn't do that, and you shouldn't too. Some things are the way they are because it's the most optimal way for them to be. The passage of time is an excellent tutor of what might be considered as a proven solution. The master branch concept has been working for a long time. I have it in my muscle memory by now. And NOW some kind of enlightened, progressive geniuses are going to tinker with how the feedback loops between my mind and the universe have been set up? No way bozos. Get back to school. Take some lessons on philosophy, and maybe even oh history, so you can understand that a wise man isn't going to speak until it's needed. Not even to mention that he isn't going to progressively cry on anyone's shoulder that he doesn't like a this or that definition. I'm a master of my own self, therefore I'm a racist. Said no one to anyone ;) One thing is sure - I'm not going to be a slave to the puppets of the neo-marxist war on language.
It's sad to hear this instead of people taking action against actual slavery.<p>This is onomatophobia, fear of hearing names. Github is catering to people trying to ignore the problem (slavery) that still exists because of inaction instead of clearing the name "master" from the bad connotation. Logically, it's difficult to battle problems (like slavery) by forgetting it or ignoring that it exists in the first place.<p>The change is counter-productive for both social and technical contributions.
Can I call that Githubs silly master plan?<p>Anyway, Fossils main branch is called "trunk" which actually makes more sense than "master" especially because Fossil also has leafs.
All the time and money that will go into this would be much better spent donating to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or another organization fighting to solve the real problems.
A StackOverflow thread describes some ways to do this when creating a new git repo. Here's an alias that seems to work:<p><pre><code> # https://stackoverflow.com/q/42871542/2040410
new = !git init && git checkout -b main && git commit --allow-empty -m \"new\"
</code></pre>
It's possible this alias will leave "master" defined but in a detached state (not pointing to a commit). I haven't checked this.
Ok, I have to ask - will one of them be a synonym? I imagine there are millions of hardcoded words out there that will break unless they both map to the same thing.
Everybody knowing that is a replacement for the word "Master". After 50 years, `Main` === `Master`. Will it?<p>`root` is better if you really want to make a change. Or rand() is your friend.<p>Maybe I'm not a native English speaker. After knowing the history of Master/Slave. I still not linking them to the bad side.<p>If they can, rename `Git` also. Acutally I have some complaints from my clients before.
Seem unnecessary to me, though I do like less keystrokes to type.<p>If the word master makes some black people feel uncomfortable, the issue isn't git. It lies in the society.
While we're at it, isn't the `git` word offensive? I mean, based on <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git</a> git means foolish or worthless person! It's not acceptable to call any person worthless! Please change this name.
So there is an actual problem that they could work on. Often the branch which most users should clone and use is not the bleeding edge working branch, which often is master. It would be nice if you could set the default branch for cloning for most users somehow.<p>Edit: so it does! You learn something new...
companies like github should remain apolitical. this is pure nonesense, merely a show of force by otherwise impotent and misguided liberals. take your outrage somewhere else.
> 4. If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the tech community, feels like a no brainer to me!<p>Does/did slavery only affect black people?<p>It’s really tiresome to see companies and celebrities voice support for equality, freedom, human rights in America while staying quiet (and even telling people to keep politics away from their platform) when it comes to the Hong Kong protests.
Master/Slave labeling IS weird. When I first saw it in reference to drive configurations, I recall thinking how maybe there was a better way to label them.<p>But as others pointed out here, "Master" branch is not using that source for the term. Changing it in this context is actively harmful to BLM and race equality.<p>So, ignore this and don't be a pussy. (Historically pussy == cat by the way. So I am bringing this phrase back for the same reasons that my Master branch and Blacklist/Whitelist are historically clean terms.)
I've said it before, and I predict it now again: a language that is named after valuable mineral chunks that are often/usually/predominately mined by slave labor in predominately non-white countries is better thinking about a rebrand.<p>Especially when it's basically ground zero for SJW activity in software development.