If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive?<p>I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged. AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.
I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expectation is that you change your language to accommodate the tiny number of people who are offended for no reason.<p>Language is a tool, and changes over time. If the meaning of a word actually changes to mean something offensive of course we should change it. But that isn't what has happened here, instead people are picking out one offensive definition of "master" and trying to apply it to places where it doesn't make sense. Are we going to rename "master of ceremonies", or "master record"? Of course not, because in a language where words have multiple definitions, context matters.
Can we please stop wondering about being politically correct and focus on the real problems of the world? Thanks!<p>I would also like to add the fact that politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general. I don't think that any other engineering field has this much drama over some words that have been part of our whole life until now like IT is having.
I’m fascinated when people, including myself, are offended by noises other people make with their faces.<p>You can try to ban words, but that doesn’t abolish the thought that generated the word. However, that doesn’t stop people from trying.<p>Ultimately compelled speech is an attempt at mind control.<p>From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak</a><p>“Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania, the ruling English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.”<p>—<p>In the future, how will people be able to judge whether they are enslaved or oppressed if the concepts and historical records of slavery are erased?
The branch name "master" does not have "golden master" or "master copy" roots: <a href="https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html" rel="nofollow">https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...</a>
Sigh... sad to see the tech community bullied into compliance over a non-issue by political correctness activists.<p>It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.
Will there be a warning if you try to use 'master' as a refname if it doesn't exist but 'main' does? I assume beginners using educational resources that aren't up to date with this change will be really confused.
Looking forward to all the bugs and problems this will cause. At least some over-sensitive ppl (or trolls?) will be happy.
One more to add to <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_the_George_Floyd_protests" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_name_changes_due_to_...</a>
Non-issue. I've run the following because I'm used to it:<p><pre><code> git config --global init.defaultBranch master
</code></pre>
This default doesn't matter to me.
In my professional experience as a teacher of high school children the following terms consistently cause problems in class:<p>- <i>git</i>: literally a pejorative<p>- any website name ending in <i>-hub</i>, cf websites of interest to teenage boys<p>Imagine a software project called <i>catshit</i> made popular by a related website called <i>catshitpiss</i> where their great pearl-clutching debate is about how it potentially alienates people with cat fur allergies.
The change doesn't make my life worse in the slightest, and may improve someone else's mental health. No reason for me to be against it at all.
Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book.<p>'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.
I don't really mind this change. But selective outrage like this is really strange. Some people on Twitter decide a word is offensive and the next day I am just expected to just stop using them. It's hard enough to learn English without these new laws all the time. I don't think this happens to any other language.
Now I am tempted to set the default branch to "offensive" or "inappropriate" :D<p>On a more serious note, I can agree that the master/slave terminology is not the best choice of words, but how is the usage of the word "master" in git deemed offensive?
As a Slav I feel offended by changes like this, mainly because it means that someone saw a word that - in a totally different context - and thought of the bad meaning. What next?
s/killall/pleaseturnoff?<p>I also have a bad feeling about Parus major (the bird).
This is ethics grandstanding without putting in any of the work and does more to divide us human beings than it does to heal.<p>Class politics not identity politics. All of us are workers in the service of the true masters holding the leash to capital emancipation. This is how I know you black brother, this is how I know you Asian sister, my fellow workers. It's the cause worth fighting for, not helpless endless division built on a bedrock I can never be: the color of your skin or the shape of your brow.
I think there is more to this than people usually see. While I agree to those who say that people are being irrationally offended, I see banning of word master as exactly what would a master do.<p>Not only methods are silly, because it seems a paradox to me that enforcing unfair policies makes happier those who were victims of unfair policy enforcement. (Oh, wait, no paradox here, just human nature), but what concerns me much more is enforcing of US culture. Companies eliminate words master, black, and others like offensive ones, but they may not be offensive in other cultures. Even more, replacements may be even more offensive. Why questionable fear of offending some of 40 million black U.S. people by just using a word, without any intent to offend anyone is enough to enforce some country-specific culture based policy on 7 billion people?
All political correctness talk aside, "main" is a much better name for the main branch.<p>There was a similar debate about blacklist and whitelist, and I much prefer the recommended alternative: blocklist and allowlist.<p>The meanings if those new terms are self-evident.
Political correctness run amok.<p>It's dumb that people find this offensive.<p>It's dumber that people are renaming their branches.<p>It's dumbest that Git itself has been consumed by this madness.
Political issues aside, it seems that 'master' was hardcoded in several places on the code<p>I'd have imagined that it was more of a config issue than code, but apparently not.
What exactly is the rationale behind changing the default branch name? It seems like significant effort is being devoted to this (code changes, fixing broken CI, etc.) but I don't understand why any of it is necessary.
I'm fine with this. It costs me almost nothing, but it means something to some people and I see no reason to block them from getting it.<p>And its gonna be juuuust a bit easier to explain git to non native speakers who understand 'main' and not 'master'. A bit. Tiny bit.
When this came up initially I asked some of our PoC employees for their thoughts on it down the pub. One didn't care, and the other thought it was stupid.<p>We did change to exclusion/inclusion lists though, as that terminology is used when communicating with customers.
There is a scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz says: "We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"<p>I find these shananigans very much in the same spirit.
When will they change the name of the software itself? I’m pretty sure “git” is a more offensive term than “master,” as it means an “unpleasant or contemptible person.” The point of the word is to use it when intending to be offensive.
The other day I noticed my freshly created repo on GH was with main, and I took the time to create a master and make it the new default, and then deleting main.<p>It was my only way to say FU to the word police mafia
Meh. I'll change it back. I'm not "dying on a hill" either when I do this because nobody will care. Nobody that I work with will care and nobody that looks at my source code online will care.<p>If and when someone does care about what I name my branch, it will be an easy way for me to identify a person that I would rather avoid working with.<p>The reason I care enough to even change it back is because I think the whole idea is driven by stupidity and it's my personal policy to not give into stupid demands. I simply don't do political correctness. If people don't like it, they can just fuck right off.