Why renaming Git’s master branch is a terrible idea

Why renaming Git’s master branch is a terrible idea(felipec.wordpress.com)

27 points by nmj 5 years ago | 8 comments

"Slavery was an institution, and masters simply played a role, they were not inherently good or bad, in fact some masters treated their slaves really well, to the point that many didn’t want to stop being slaves."

I thought that this was going to be a technical article about specific problems that would occur if we changed the branch name, but nope, straight up defence of slavery.

nvarsj 5 years ago | |

That was definitely a troublesome paragraph. I’m not sure what point he was trying to make exactly. The rest of the article is much better though. Master recordings for example - is this offensive? It seems almost identical to the usage of master in git - to mean the primary or original version. Or Grandmasters in chess. It gets a bit ridiculous to think master in itself is a bad word, doesn’t it?

felipec 5 years ago | |

Maybe next time try to actually read the article before criticizing it.

010101010101 5 years ago |

> Slavery was an institution, and masters simply played a role, they were not inherently good or bad, in fact some masters treated their slaves really well, to the point that many didn’t want to stop being slaves. Just like a boss plays a tyrannical role in principle, in practice many bosses are a delight.

This really makes it difficult to take anything in this article seriously.

tomp 5 years ago |

It should be obvious by now that cancel culture isn't about being considerate and avoiding being offensive, but instead the point is bullying others and dominating them. They even admit as much:

> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list

From Scott Aaronson's blog, when Quantum Supremacy was cancelled, because, as "master", "supremacy" is also wrongspeak.

Edit: link for the above quote https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4450

darkerside 5 years ago |

The tone of this article makes it pretty difficult to have a substantive discussion, but I do think there are a few good points. Primarily that users would benefit from a deprecation path.

I think there's also a mostly unspoken idea in there that it is really difficult to address socially sensitive issues in an email listserv format.

Finally, I do think there's something to the Munchausen's by proxy argument. It's a good metaphor, but an inflammatory one, and I wish it were handled with more sensitivity because of that.

vr46 5 years ago |

* I would run out of red pen if I were marking this post as a paper, but it's also tiringly inflammatory.

* I also don't know that any progressives are pushing blasphemy laws, this is by definition a conservative action to preserve and protect institutions.

* I was hoping for a technical article too, but w/e.

Mizza 5 years ago |

A particularly annoying side effect of this is that if you want to bring an existing repo into GitHub, the instructions now include `git branch -M main`, which will cause all sorts of problems if you have documentation, aliases and scripts which relate to a repo which exists in multiple places.

I don't mind if GitHub wants to change their default, but don't assume that I want to change that for my own already-existing local repos.