Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for the main branch.<p>The term "master" for a branch name always felt a little strange to me. One might ask, "What is master?" The answer usually is, "It is the main branch."<p>The same thing held true for "trunk" in the SVN world, although it made more sense. One might ask, "What is trunk?" It requires a lengthy explanation, "It is the main development branch. We will create other release branches from it. Imagine a tree with a trunk from which other branches grow."<p>One is less likely to ask, "What is the main branch?" The branch name is self-explanatory.
'master' branch is like a master recording, an original from which copies can be made off. I don't have a Master degree in English, but it feels someone is terribly confused.
You can continue to pretend otherwise, but this is an ideological infiltration into a supposedly rational field. Downvotes or not I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
In one swift stroke, GitHub fixed racism and diversity issues in tech. And all that without spending a penny, awkward outreach programmes or deep soul-searching as to the roots of the problem. In your face, naysayers.<p>Oh, wait...
I don't think you can erase words from the vocabulary to get rid of bad undertones in society. If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily offended, and might be onto on some crusade. Renaming variables and tech paradigms that refer to computer idioms, not people, is lame. The real problem is misconception and bigotry in people's hearts.<p>We could stop using the sex/porn industry and reduce the human trafficking epidemic in some countries, or completely stop buying from companies that manufacture in horrible conditions.. or change computer idioms and debate until we're blue.
I've a Master of Science degree, will that chance too? Is anyone offended by that terminology?<p>[Edit] maybe I should clarify: in my native language master only has the connotation of mastery of a subject. A slave owner can't be called 'master', so we don't have that unpleasant crossover.
I don't have a problem with changing the name but the motivation bothers me. For years we've had unintuitive/unfriendly names - an example on this thread was "pull requests", name picked by someone who was so high that he was seeing himself from the 3rd person, in a mirror, while standing on their head.<p>God forbid we change the names so that they actually start making sense; oh no, we stick with V1 til the heat death of the universe, we wouldn't want to confuse already confused developers by fixing the dumb thing.<p>Ok, fine, now that you've started, will you fix the rest of the names too? The ones that aren't politically charged, that is.
I suspect that it is not far away the day when the academic degree "master of science" will also be renamed. :) It is complete insanity. We are starting to live in Orwellian world. If you remember in 1984 the abonamation of the language in a way to not allow wrong thinking was one of the characteristics of the totalitarian government. :(
We already have a problem with frequent and, in many cases avoidable, API/interface changes in our industry. Think about the last time you use some library, then it's API changes, and you spend a day fixing this in your codebase.<p>The fact that this change affects only new repos is not reassuring. There are tons of tutorials, scripts and other stuff out there relying on the default naming ("upstream" is the other branch name that is frequently used). Git is already complex enough, especially for beginners.<p>Also, other git hosting services (and git itself) still use "master" as the default branch name, which will create even more confusion.
Is there any movement on the Git side?<p>I'm assuming this doesn't actually apply if you follow the more "classic" method of creating a Github repo: creating a local git repo and just adding Github as a remote.<p>Edit: I figured that Git itself probably wouldn't change the default branch name (at least not easily), but thought that just making it configurable would be a "neutral" way to make it easier for people to do this if they wanted to.<p>I guess they, in fact, already did that: <a href="https://superuser.com/a/1572156" rel="nofollow">https://superuser.com/a/1572156</a>
This is a tiny change that has no substantial negative effect on anyone’s life. If they’d renamed “pull requests” to “merge requests” no one would care, at all. Let’s <i>please</i> not make a big deal out of it.
Rename of master branch is happening at the company I work at. I find it rather pointless but the company is paying for my time so if they want me to spend time on this then fine by me.<p>I will still call it the master branch though.
"Inclusivity includes idiocy."<p>If you've ever wondered why software quality has taken a nosedive in recent years...<p>"At least we're diverse!"<p>Thanks for all the downvotes. The bias in here is really obvious. ;-)
The etymology of "master" according to Wiktionary:<p>From Middle English maister, mayster, meister, from Old English mǣster, mæġster, mæġester, mæġister, magister (“master”), from Latin magister (“chief, teacher, leader”), from Old Latin magester, from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s, (as in magnus (“great”)) + -ester/-ister
I don‘t mind renaming the default branch.<p>But I’ll see many tools breaking or bugs surfacing because they can’t find the master branch.<p>One repository I used didn’t have a “master” branch but a “Master” branch. That was annoying.<p>Git doesn’t have a concept of a main branch. Maybe we will get that now as a result of GitHub’s change.
Honest question: anyone here on HN from a black US background? How do you feel about all this"political revisionism" of the tech jargon?
I find it silly to the point that it's offensive, but I'm not black and I don't live in the US.
"Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms."<p>FFS. Is this some kind of joke? This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers.
I'm having trouble understanding why this was flagged. It covers a major change to tool many (most?) developers use including time and reasoning. It's straight to the point, doesn't seem to seem to have much fluff, and isn't really trained with author's option / ideology. Surely much worse and off topic political articles reach the front page without being mass flagged.<p>On a random note, I've had vouch for flagged articles / comments before but it seems to very irregular. What decides if the "vouch" option is available to a user?