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Gitlab default branch name changes to main

105 pointsby ProZsoltabout 4 years ago

33 comments

macspoofingabout 4 years ago
Yeah, I get it. It is a necessary change just so you take this of the table and not deal with the sporadic complaints that would come. Keeping the &#x27;master&#x27; or &#x27;master-slave&#x27; (in context of HA) terms just isn&#x27;t worth potentially offending someone, or losing a sale, or getting bad press. We changed our verbage a couple years in our product as well just for that reason (Master-Slave to Primary-Secondary). The previous company I worked at (circa 2006) did the same as well after a complaint, so this nomenclature change was happening for a few years now. Meh, whatever.<p>It would be nice if that was the end of it, but it feels like we&#x27;re now just looking for things to be offended by. For example, I have to admit that the terms &#x27;whitelist&#x27;&#x2F;&#x27;blacklist&#x27; being labeled as not &#x27;inclusive&#x27; caught me by surprise because my brain didn&#x27;t even make that connection ... at all. I wish we, the global community, didn&#x27;t all have to pay for America&#x27;s internal cultural hangups.
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elricabout 4 years ago
I would like to point out that it&#x27;s perfectly OK to have master&#x2F;slave relations between computers, hard disks and git branches. The only place where it&#x27;s problematic is between humans. Perhaps we would do well to remember that words can have different meanings in different contexts. It&#x27;s nice to try to be considerate of people who are sensitive to certain issues, but at the same time they would do well to limit their sensitivity to where it&#x27;s appropriate.
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Olumdeabout 4 years ago
I&#x27;m African and I think these name changes are ludicrous. Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin?<p>Reminds me of something Martin Luther King (MLK) said after he started the second phase of his activism. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had been passed 1964 and 1965 respectively, so MLK started to agitate for economic opportunities and equality. He noted that this would be the harder fight because allowing people to vote costs nothing. It was during this phase of his activism that he was assassinated.<p>Changing the name of your repo means little and is not a substitute for looking deeply at your organization and asking the hard questions. You can call your repo Conan the Barbarian conqueror of all, or master. It doesn&#x27;t matter to me.<p><i>Edit</i><p>Can I just add that IMO overcoming bias can only be achieved by individual effort. No amount of talk about diversity and equality by the company will fix the problem if any persons involved in the hiring process has biases and preferences rooted in ethnicity. If diversity initiatives were sufficient Google would be a more diverse place today. Not faulting them for trying though.<p>My experience: I once interviewed a candidate who was much older than the rest of the team and I could see ageism welling up in me as soon as I met him. I had to consciously blind myself to the age of the candidate and forced myself to consider the him on merit only. Turns out the guy was great, and I agreed with the team that he would be a good hire. All I ask is not to look at the color or my skin but only on what I know. And do not offer me a job that I cannot do just because you want to be diverse.
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cmcknabout 4 years ago
I think the default branch name change has been good for the ecosystem; “master” didn’t always make sense for whatever workflow was used, and it was hardcoded all over a bunch of tooling. I think “main” makes more sense, regardless of politics, and this encouraged a lot of software to make the default branch configurable.
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av8avengerabout 4 years ago
Are there actually any devs out there that are really offended and feel excluded or worse than others because the default git branch is called master?<p>I work in a fairly small company, but if i think of all the things we&#x27;d have to change in our infrastructure to exclude all of those offending words (like Black- and White-Lists), we&#x27;d probably be busy for a couple of weeks.
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truculentabout 4 years ago
Either<p>(1) Default name doesn&#x27;t have inherent value; therefore, changing the default isn&#x27;t a big deal (low downside), even if the upside is low<p>(2) &quot;master&quot; is for some reason a better name than &quot;main&quot;<p>I never see the people complaining about this stuff spelling out a reason why it&#x27;s a bad idea to change (2), and am forced to conclude that we are in scenario (1).<p>It seems to me that opinion is much more divided on the amount of upside in changing the name. But if the downside is virtually non-existent, who cares? If this is important to some people, shouldn&#x27;t we just listen to them, and move on?
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john_alanabout 4 years ago
We should probably stop referring to nice teeth as straight and white too. Wouldn’t want to offend.<p>If you can’t disambiguate software development from human abuse the problem is your grasp of semantics not society.
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csenseabout 4 years ago
I didn&#x27;t think of the word &quot;master&quot; being offensive in the context of Git branches until the issue came up a few months ago.<p>Once I became aware that some people are offended by the word &quot;master&quot; in this context, I immediately realized that I was blinded by my privilege, and I will henceforth name my branches with a new social consciousness.<p>That is, I was blinded by intellectual privilege: I had assumed that anyone smart enough to use Git would be smart enough not to care about this.<p>I will continue to name my own branches &quot;master,&quot; and I have successfully convinced the organization I work for to do the same.<p>Before, I called branches &quot;master&quot; without any political intention at all. Now, I do so with an express political intention to demonstrate my explicit defiance of the censorious sort of people who insist that <i>I</i> must change my words because <i>you</i> might be offended by them.<p>Being upset about the name &quot;master branch&quot; is a <i>completely ridiculous</i> politicization of technology.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of downloading&#x2F;buying and hoarding every mathematics and computer science textbook and paper I can find that uses the word &quot;binary,&quot; since I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll be banned soon due to being offensive to trans people, and someone ought to be preserving knowledge for when our society stops this insane witch-hunt and regains its sanity.<p>For posting this comment, I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll be accused of being a racist, and stand a real risk of losing some karma.<p>I&#x27;m not a racist. The way I interact with people of all races is ethical, and gives me no trouble sleeping at night. I&#x27;m glad slavery ended long ago.<p>I&#x27;m simply taking a stand, in my own little way, against political correctness run amok.
mokarmaabout 4 years ago
Ironically, it&#x27;ll probably be the Scrum Master that ends up creating a Story to update everything to Main.
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narvenabout 4 years ago
When I think that people are not that stupid, there&#x27;s always someone that surprises me.<p>What on earth has the name &quot;master&quot; to do with anything? Why dont we remove the word &quot;master&quot; from all languages in the world and make it a tabu to even speak of it. What does master&#x2F;slave in relation to &quot;hu-mans&quot; has to do with anything else in the world that has the same name?<p>Just the amount of money and work hours done by everyone just to make this completely stupid change and not to mention behing completely stupid, its insane, could feed all the starving people on the world.<p>MY BRANCH WILL ALWAYS BE CALLED MASTER IN ALL THE PROJECTS I CONTROL, TILL THE DAY I DIE.<p>PS: Sometimes I wonder if people actually have work to be done, to take us to the futur and beyond, or they just go to the toilet and come up with these ideas.
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oap_bramabout 4 years ago
I for one think it&#x27;s great that people are willing to make things a little more accessible for more people. If people want to be part of our community of developers I think it&#x27;s great that these organizations listen to people who might have a problem with certain terminology. Even though I don&#x27;t have a problem with those terms, I think it&#x27;s still worth evaluating if they&#x27;re worth keeping if it makes it harder for someone to be part of our community.<p>Hope more of you feel the same, as I&#x27;m getting kind of tired of the &quot;the SJWs are at it again&quot; shtick. There&#x27;s also legitimate reasons to why these changes are necessary outside of some loud obnoxious screams from certain SJW-like people, that yes, are annoying to hear. Some of the response from our community to &quot;push back against this&quot; is just equally weird, tone deaf and childish however.<p>Say what you want, be we all know we&#x27;ve done silly refactors over smaller things. So don&#x27;t make this bigger than it should be: it&#x27;s about making our community bigger by making it easier for people to be part of it!
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franky47about 4 years ago
Since we&#x27;re talking about naming branches, what are your preferred names for branches ? I like 4-letter names:<p><pre><code> - `main` points to the last release for libraries (along with tags for history) - `prod` points to production in deployable projects (not libraries) - `next` is the development branch for the next version - `deps` is a temporary branch for dependency updates, squashed and merged regularly onto `next`</code></pre>
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nobody0about 4 years ago
Actually, almost all of our ancestors had been slaves longer or shorter in history regardless of race&#x2F;country.
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lamontcgabout 4 years ago
father&#x2F;son nodes were changed to parent&#x2F;child long before &quot;wokeness&quot; or &quot;SJWs&quot; or even &quot;PC&quot;
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Longhanksabout 4 years ago
I wonder if a master&#x27;s degree is also offensive.
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phtrivierabout 4 years ago
Sad that the article fails to mention what proportion of people of color are employed by GitLab, how that number is evolving, and what steps they&#x27;re taking to avoid actual discrimination ; as well as their policies regarding the role of contemporary forced labor in their hardware supply chain. (It&#x27;s entirely possible they&#x27;re doing the best they can on those fronts, too.)<p>Such a renaming is clearly a &quot;long hanging fruit&quot;, and a way to start a conversation.<p>I can&#x27;t entirely shake up, though, that though that any minute discussing the naming of git branch repositories is <i>not</i> spent on discussing slavery and racism. Which I&#x27;m unfortunately not qualified to do.
eliabout 4 years ago
We made this change for our repos internally a year or two ago. Making it the default is a great step and I hope others follow suit.
mleonhardabout 4 years ago
Some words trigger strong negative emotions for many people. For example, anyone with a loved one who died by suicide can be triggered by the word &#x27;suicide&#x27;. They can be working productively and happily, see the word &#x27;suicide&#x27; in some code, and then spend the rest of the day suffering.<p>People deserve to work and live without triggering their traumas.<p>Name changes are cheap to implement. For example, we can use &#x27;shutdown&#x27; instead of &#x27;suicide&#x27; and help our teammates to be more productive and happy.<p>So let&#x27;s just all do the name changes without complaining or judging the people who ask for them. We&#x27;ll do it because we care about them.<p>Potential trigger words and suitable alternatives:<p>- suicide, abort -&gt; exit, crash, stop, halt, shutdown, terminate<p>- kill -&gt; stop, halt, shutdown, terminate<p>- infect -&gt; assimilate, convert, install<p>- master -&gt; main, primary, leader<p>- slave -&gt; backup, secondary, follower<p>- blacklist -&gt; denylist, blocklist<p>- whitelist -&gt; allowlist, passlist<p>- daemon, demon -&gt; server, worker<p>- cop -&gt; supervisor, monitor, watchdog<p>- male -&gt; plug, prong, sender<p>- female -&gt; jack, socket, receiver<p>- mate -&gt; connect, link, join<p>- gender-changer -&gt; adapter, socket-to-socket adapter, plug-to-plug adapter
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woudsmaabout 4 years ago
That saves two bytes.
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kbdabout 4 years ago
The most unfortunate part of all this churn is that git didn’t provide a way to ask it what a repository’s main branch is named.
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darepublicabout 4 years ago
I think it&#x27;s important for people to resist this senseless exercise in imposing conformity, for its own sake.
alpineidyll3about 4 years ago
What if it was never about economic slavery, and computer people are just really into S&amp;M.
jdlygaabout 4 years ago
It&#x27;s also nice because main is less characters and less confusing for new git users.
dvfjsdhgfvabout 4 years ago
I see this article is flagged. Really? Can&#x27;t we even discuss this issue like adults?
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ipsocannibalabout 4 years ago
Wait until the word &#x27;native&#x27; gets added to the list of non-inclusive terms.
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Chainloaderabout 4 years ago
Hmmm this explain why git push origin master failed for me...
rvzabout 4 years ago
Right I should have known that it is Sunday slow news day.
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naebotherabout 4 years ago
If we must have a struggle-session on this and rename to appease the performative gods, why not just call the default branch, you know, &quot;default&quot;?
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mackrevinackabout 4 years ago
its strange that a company with &quot;git&quot; in their name would be worried about offending people
EdwinLarkinabout 4 years ago
This is american cultural imperialism. Plaina and simple. I am planning to migrate to Russian or Chinese hosted git alternatives.
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gear54rusabout 4 years ago
Another victim of this hysteria.<p>Will surely make a point to switch it back every time I create a repo.
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hYKdTfpaabout 4 years ago
This change does no good, it serves only to allow people to virtue signal.
Zealotuxabout 4 years ago
Did they sign a contract with ICE
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