That said, this is slightly ridiculous. Have customers seriously complained about the term "master"? And my impression was that the usage was more similar to "master copy" than "master of the plantation".

Honestly, it's frustrating to me that companies are willing to take token actions like this that are almost completely irrelevant in the scheme of things but unwilling to lose profit by, for example, not contracting with ICE. Actions like this feels like veiled advertising, even when, as I'm sure is true in this case, there are genuine motives behind them. It seems like the structure of corporations allows only the genuine intentions that require little sacrifice to be acted upon.

It's a stupid subject to have a flame war over, but I don't understand the logic at all.

Now even if this catches on, then yeah OK I'll start naming my branches as main unless I want to make a political statement, which would just add to confusion when developing.

Meanwhile these people will pat each other on the back, yell "yeah! We sure made a difference." while black people keep getting fucked by the system and their lives don't get improved one iota.

just... why?

The follow up tweet from the original reqeustor is:

> 1. “Main” is shorter! Yay brevity!

> 2. It’s even easier to remember, tbh

> 3. If it makes any of my teammates feel an ounce more comfortable, let’s do it!

> 4. If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the tech community, feels like a no brainer to me!

1 - Not sure that's an important reason, why not change it to just "M"?

2 - Not for people who are already using git and have lived their entire lives on master (or for those more considerate developers, have lived their entire lives PRing into master)

3 & 4 - This is what I'm talking about, is there anyone who is actually feeling isolated and uncomfortable, or are there just a load of white people who have focused on literally the most unimportant aspect of being a black person in the tech community?

If you are going to help, actually do something that improves the lives of people. Maybe, you should really put some effort into beefing up the Computer Science programs in black high schools and colleges? You are Microsoft, and had a damn policy of only hiring people from certain schools for certain job areas. In 90, one of your damn reps told a classroom of students that they were only good for "help desk" positions because of the school they went to. I'm betting some all black colleges were not on the hire list for actual developer jobs.

Actually doing something useful is hard, this is just signalling how cool you are.

What I care about is that this will inevitably lead to companies and individuals that, for any reason (due to having the name "master" hardcoded in a lot of scripts, for instance), do not make this change in their repositories being labeled as being pro-racism.

We all know how this goes.

This insanity just grows every single day. The purity policing grows ever more intense. It's making my world view bleaker by the minute.

I’ve never considered “master” branch anything odd, saying “master copy” makes sense. What about music? “Remastering” something... or the terminology around mastering a skill?

Things are a bit out of control. As people say if you look at that term and the first thought is race related that’s on you.

I could see a desire to remove the word “slave” from any replication business. Since the “s” word is directly loaded. But the “m” word has many other definitions outside of that.

I understand these things stem from a place of discomfort with the racial crisis in the US - and I applaud the intentions.

However, these requests are not inclusive to:

- The foreigner in your team trying to think and communicate in English, while tip-toeing around whatever was deemed offensive this week on Twitter.

- The developer in Botswana trying to keep up with this week's terminology changes as dictated by Twitter influencers in the US.

I dread the day when someone gets in trouble for saying "Hey guys, I added the URL in the whitelist and pushed it to master"

But the use of master here is from 5 b: an original from which copies can be made especially : a master recording (such as a magnetic tape)

There is no implied slave.

It's derived from masterpiece. Something that a master craftsman has created.

Master has many definitions and usages. Master of a slave is only one minor usage.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master

Master/slave are pretty commonly used terms whenever we talk about things like distributed systems and communication buses. Essentially everywhere that one process, controller, computer, etc. is meant to have authority or control over some other entity or entities, this is often described as a master-slave relationship.

May seem like a silly gesture to some, but imagine feeling an emotional trigger every time you had to use a basic tool for your job. That'd piss me off.

donate the cash equivalent to the engineering hours required to make and test this name change to BLM instead, and get something of actual consequence done.

Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?

edit: not to mention 30 years of:

if branch in ['master', 'main'] ...

To address systemic racism, we need to change people's preconceptions and prejudices. These are things that are picked up and learned from other people in one's environment. Removing these words makes them even more intangible than they already are.

Creating prejudice is easy to communicate. Removing it, on the other hand, is an "absence" of something, which is much harder to get across linguistically, semantically and emotionally.

Unless git changes its default branch name to something else, isn't Github's approach futile?

When you "git init", git creates the master branch locally.

And then when you push, I sincerely hope GitHub wouldn't somehow rename that branch to something else...

I'm certain that most people would see renaming master to main as fairly benign. However. if a company like Github can be open to making a change like this, even if it is purely symbolic, it sends a message that changes to the status quo are possible.

I've also seen some comments complain about the technical difficulty of this change. If this forces developers to put some effort into updating tools that are hardcoded to refer to the primary branch as master then it's good from a purely technical perspective. Especially to help those of us following trunk-based development who already refer it as the trunk.

Now this is all people will think about and if they change the word to 'main' it will get memed and ridiculed and mocked to oblivion because of the huge inconvenience it will cause.

It will have so many unintended consequences.

It solves nothing honestly.

No problem that can be fixed by changing the default name of the branch created by git init will, in so doing, meaningfully soothe any sincere moral wound.

I'm a POC in the tech community and couldn't care less about "master" being problematic. The tweets you quoted likely came from a white person who thinks a little to highly of themselves and want to go after low-hanging fruit.

Want to make a difference for POCs and Black people? Vote the racists and profit-driven politicians out of office this November and replace them with people who are more qualified to lead and actually care about the public.

And in fact, at work, we use both git and mercurial, and they have slightly different terminologies. In particular, git's "master" is mercurial's "default". The result is that we are sometimes mixing the two. And we naturally ended up calling the master/default branch the "main branch" with the understanding that it is "master" in git and "default" in mercurial.

That we naturally came up with this name means it is a good name. And because it is the shortest, it has my vote.

That you are all used to "master" is no excuse either. There are other version control systems than git, and "master" is not a universal convention. In mercurial, it is "default", and in SVN, it is "trunk". If you are a professional developer, you are probably going to use several different VCS during your career, and it is not a good thing getting too attached to "master".

The main problem I see with the change is that if you are just getting started with git, most training material will refer to "master", and having different conventions can make things confusing at first. Of course, experts know that there is nothing special about "master" and can adapt to any situation, but beginners need guidelines, and we might as well make them consistent.

Seems that way. It's actually offensive to suggest that such a person should be offended in the first place. It's a "we know better than you and you should be offended" attitude.

Wouldn't focusing on fixing this situation be more beneficial than reinforcing it?

What they should be doing is scholarship and mentoring programs to increase the base if that is their real goal. But that takes actual effort and costs real money.

However I have always felt that the word “slave” (as the counterpart to master) was/is a mistake. It seems to be a relic of the past where people weren’t really thinking through the terminology they chose.

More modern approaches typically use other word pairs, like master/minion, sever/client, active/backup, master/agent, etc. Different pairs are chosen that better describe the relationships, and I suspect those choices were made, at least in some way, to avoid using the term “slave”.

But in this case, there's not even a slave branch.