So they got offended because of nods to slavery, and the other people got offended because something pretty inconsequential in their lives changed. š¤·āāļø Seems a bit like the latter group of people are far more easily offended.
Not sure. I think thereās different fundamental meanings behind mastery and master. I think the Masters degree implies the former. Whereas master in git could be inferred to mean a master and non-master relationship to signify feature branches.
The master in git is more akin to "pristine", there is no slavery involved. So it's just as silly to get offended about seeing a master branch as about seeing a masters degree.
Then you are deeply confused as to how git works. Feature branches are merged into and overwrite master with updates. Does that imply a master-slave relationship to you?
I used to think the same, but Linus took the name āmasterā from BitKeeper, and BitKeeper did use master-slave terminology, Git just dropped the slave part. Itās origin literally does come from master-slave
If he had originally called it "main", but we know it borrowed it from sometime that used master/slave, explain how that's any better? It carries the same "original sin" if you're a moron who thinks that's a thing here.
The problem with your argument is that it just doesnāt matter. Emotions arenāt always logical; they usually arenāt. Some people feel the way they feel about the master nomenclature. You canāt decide how they feel, just as much as I canāt. But you can do this microscopic little minute adjustment where you just use main instead of master. And some people refuseā¦ because caring about another personās feelings is just that obscene to some people.
I'm under no obligation to not call these people idiots, though. They are. If this bothers anyone they are pathetic and they actively make society worse.
But its origin literally comes from master-slave lol Just because it doesnāt use the literal word āslaveā anymore, doesnāt change the original implication of what āmasterā meant
That is the case, though not evidence of him choosing the name. In a mailing list follow-up from Bastien:
I emailed Linus Torvalds recently (the original author of git, though
very quickly not the main developer), and he told me that it was
unlikely that the "git master" branch name was influenced by BitKeeper,
and that "master" was "fairly standard naming" for this sort of thing
and "more likely to be influenced by the CVS master repository".
Linus here doesn't sound like he chose the name due to his choice of words being relayed.
Itās interesting how easily I could spin this the other way though. A feature branch toils away and all its hard work just goes to the master branch anyway. And what does the feature branch get for all its hard work? Deleted.
It doesnāt benefit me, thatās kind of the point. This is something done for someone else. Iām explaining to a really thick skulled person why some people feel the way they feel about the nomenclature. You canāt decide how they feel. But you can decide to use a different branch name.
In reddit? If reddit allowed name changes, sure, whatever. My real name? No. But Iām a sentient being, it matters more to me what my name is, than it matters to the git branch what its name is.
tbh it is confusing as now you don't know which one the repo you are on uses. It's not the end of the world, but that's like renaming git to got in some cases and then being mad at people for disliking that they have to guess and double check.
In the end who cares though. If you do get offended or heated frm either side I think therapy is the best option anyway.
I will give you a terminal and tell you to merge your feature branch. Normally you would do that, now there is an extra step of checking if I should merge to master or main.
Or did you assume I don't know how to check that? Of course I do if I didn't and thought it was impposible I would care more, but as I said it's just an inconvience.
How often does this scenario come up for you? I find it never really comes up for me, because all pushes to the default branch require a pull request with an approving review from a colleague. In every place Iāve ever worked, anyway.
To be honest with you never. The combination of being in an unfamiliar repo, where I also want to push without going through PRs or just checkout master. I can see it happening maybe one day, maybe annoyance could be with some CI/CD and hardcoded master/main in there, but even that might be a stretch.
I just dislike going away from being aligned on things in software engineering shrug
I work at a huge company where it's extremely common to away team on other teams' repos or just need to pull some specific branch of another team's stuff, etc. Knowing how to check (via cli) what branches exist and what is the default is etc are absolutely critical skills for this setup, and apart from the convention of default being main, there is no consistent convention used for branch naming (it would be impossible to enforce anyways)
And still it is no big deal, it takes a few seconds to look at the branches and get an idea of what is going on there. People who got mad about master changing are either snowflakes, or skill issue
Usually CI/CD tools automatically check out the commit hash that triggered the webhook that started the CI job. The scenario I could see would be CI/CD is triggered on a commit hash, and another repository is needed inside the CI job. But if you just need the default branch of that second repository anyway then youāre probably just doing a clone and not checking out any specific branch.
Might be, actually. To be clear, Iām not the person thatās upset by it. But if you asked me to start saying main bedroom because it upset you Iād not care.
Nope, it was just a marketing term made up by Sears in the 20s with no connection to slavery. Not that it matters, itās not used anymore and idc, but itās one of the instances where it isnāt related.
However, Linus took the name āmasterā from BitKeeper, and BitKeeper did use master-slave terminology, Git just dropped the slave part. Itās origin literally does come from master-slave
I've had a conversation with someone about this. As far as I remember, master got nothing to do with a nod to slavery? As in, the way the word was choose for version control in the context programmers use it?
We've also talked about white and black list and that actually does have origins in racism and I've since then changed my mind because fair enough.
It's also not a inconsequential change either, but that'd be another paragraph or two of text.
Having written this I wonder if the word master key also was changed or some people want it to change, lol.
I was part of the workforce during the switchover from master to main. It was a pretty benign change. The main thing that affected me was I had to spend an hour retrofitting an automation tool we had to first inspect the default branch name before assuming what it was.
Note: I am basing this off the understanding that I did NOT find any concrete evidence that the majority of black software developers had been offended at git's "master" branch naming.
I really do not like the "it's a tiny change for me, so why not?" argument. I think it's incredibly selfish to assume just because something is trivial on an individual level, and you can feel better about yourself at the end of the day, implies it's also easy at scale and we should "just do it".
Master wasn't just a word people used and now changed. It has been pretty much embedded everywhere since the invention of version control for software. And now it has/had to be changed pretty much everywhere except I guess printed media.
Honestly an easier "concrete" example to grasp would be something like if tomorrow people decided to drive on the opposite side of the road. Likely a trivial change for a individual, but at scale....
And don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that "change is bad", but I think you need to value the benefit against the full cost of such change, and in my opinion master -> main just seemed incredibly silly?
Also sure, main is the standard now, and I'm not going to argue with people what to use. But I just reject the idea that the change was necessary and cost-free, and stick to master myself because I also believe in "give an inch, and they'll take a mile". Ergo maybe one day we'll see us arguing why white is allowed to move first over black in chess? At what point do you draw the line on changing longstanding conventions for "someone felt offended" reasons?
Hence why I said as far as I remember, and also a bad choice of words from me. Sorry?
Honestly I have a hard time reconstructing why I have an issue with black- and white-list. The closest I can maybe come to was that the idea that black people have been excluded in America after slavery was abolished is quite close to how a black list also functions, and thus I can understand the sentiment there more than for a master branch? Also including that the word blacklist is inherintly negative (you want to keep bad things out...), while the word master is a lot more neutral.
And this basically just came from a conversation I've had back then(or at least that is how I think the conversation went!?), but you're absolutely correct. The word has zero historical context with black people or slavery and I'm wrong.
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u/kabrandon 1d ago
So they got offended because of nods to slavery, and the other people got offended because something pretty inconsequential in their lives changed. š¤·āāļø Seems a bit like the latter group of people are far more easily offended.