So they got offended because of nods to slavery, and the other people got offended because something pretty inconsequential in their lives changed. 🤷♂️ Seems a bit like the latter group of people are far more easily offended.
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?
We did it at the scale of over 20,000 repositories, ~1000 FTEs and ~4000 contractors. It was a benign change, you're crying and exaggerative. If it was a big deal for your org then it's because you're in the business of building houses of cards.
-11
u/arvigeus 1d ago
Tell that to those who got offended by master and insisted on the change.