
New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master” - davecyen
https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-to-replace-master-with-main-starting-next-month/
======
susam
Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for
the main branch.

The term "master" for a branch name always felt a little strange to me. One
might ask, "What is master?" The answer usually is, "It is the main branch."

The same thing held true for "trunk" in the SVN world, although it made more
sense. One might ask, "What is trunk?" It requires a lengthy explanation, "It
is the main development branch. We will create other release branches from it.
Imagine a tree with a trunk from which other branches grow."

One is less likely to ask, "What is the main branch?" The branch name is self-
explanatory.

~~~
andy_ppp
Master also means principal. Controlling speech due to political correctness
is extremely post modern but I’m not sure that language creates reality in the
way these people seem to think. Words are not inherently racist it’s how
people use them, therefore I’m against changes like these where clearly
there’s no racism at all in having a master branch.

~~~
loopz
Post modern probably doesn't mean what you didn't think it means. Words can be
cool, but misused.

~~~
andy_ppp
It is you who doesn’t understand post modernism, here’s a definition about
reality being constructed rather than based on science:

[https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-
body.html](https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html)

“ In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only
comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us
individually.”

Hence why the explanation that master should be changed to main to avoid some
people thinking git and GitHub are racist.

~~~
loopz
I stand corrected. Thanks!

------
justRafi
'master' branch is like a master recording, an original from which copies can
be made off. I don't have a Master degree in English, but it feels someone is
terribly confused.

~~~
roenxi
That gets to what might be the real issue here. This is a change of something
that has no relevance to the master/slave debate. It seems possible that it is
being driven by someone who is (a) not that clever and (b) making ego driven
decisions. I think that might be what is annoying people.

The whitelist/blacklist thing is a bit of a no-brainer, that one should
change. Master/slave is debatable, because it isn't actually discriminatory.
But whatever, one for the debate. Master git branches are back in no-brainer
territory as something that didn't need to change.

~~~
luckylion
> The whitelist/blacklist thing is a bit of a no-brainer, that one should
> change.

Why though, it has nothing to do with skin color. Black and white, grey area,
there are lots of things involving these colors, but they aren't about skin
color, they're about opposites. And there are plenty of other things including
color, e.g. black hole, white vest, carte blanche, but they're not about skin
color either.

~~~
roenxi
White & black skin are, practically, inherent qualities that a person can't
really do much about. The argument that associating linking the properties to
'good' and 'bad' could make people feel uncomfortable makes sense to me.
People (as evidenced by today's headline) do struggle to keep things separate
in their head.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _The argument that associating linking the properties to 'good' and 'bad'
> could make people feel uncomfortable makes sense to me. _"

Then advocates of this should also be campaigning to stop using yellow as the
color to indicate warnings, since it's insensitive to Asian-Americans.

But we all know they aren't going to.

~~~
roenxi
Asians aren't yellow though.

~~~
luckylion
And Africans aren't black, and Caucasians aren't white. Surprisingly, Native
Americans aren't red!

------
emerged
You can continue to pretend otherwise, but this is an ideological infiltration
into a supposedly rational field. Downvotes or not I'm not going to pretend
otherwise.

~~~
amazingman
You may be superficially correct, I’m not sure, but honestly the name of the
canonical git branch is not a hill worth dying on.

IMO the right move to battle the more draconian, Orwellian language policing
of the cancel culture / “antiracism” dogma is to conserve your energy for the
fights worth fighting. This just isn’t one of them.

~~~
SamReidHughes
That kind of thinking is why we have had riots destroying our cities,
arsonists starting wildfires and burning churches, and spikes in the homicide
rate this decade.

~~~
stnmtn
Yes, changing the name of github's default branch to something that makes more
sense is the reason there are nationwide protests right now. For sure man

Isn't it fun when you can just say words out loud and make it look like you
have a point?

------
rich_sasha
In one swift stroke, GitHub fixed racism and diversity issues in tech. And all
that without spending a penny, awkward outreach programmes or deep soul-
searching as to the roots of the problem. In your face, naysayers.

Oh, wait...

------
justRafi
I don't think you can erase words from the vocabulary to get rid of bad
undertones in society. If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I
suspect they are easily offended, and might be onto on some crusade. Renaming
variables and tech paradigms that refer to computer idioms, not people, is
lame. The real problem is misconception and bigotry in people's hearts.

We could stop using the sex/porn industry and reduce the human trafficking
epidemic in some countries, or completely stop buying from companies that
manufacture in horrible conditions.. or change computer idioms and debate
until we're blue.

~~~
drdaeman
> If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily
> offended

Worse, it feels like people are taught to be offended more easily, driving the
sensitivity up to the max.

<offtopic>

> We could stop using the sex/porn industry

Not going to happen. This industry had existed since times immemorial and is
going to exist no matter what for as long as humans will have sex drive (and
thus, fantasies and desires). Painting sexual and/or pornographic services as
something inherently bad is only going to make it worse by driving industry
into a darker shade. I could be terribly mistaken here (and beg pardon and
counterarguments if I am), but in my understanding it's social and legal
stigmas are what's primarily hurting people.

I don't mean to say there are no issues with that industry. Just saying that
blaming it's very existence is not a solution. And - as a personal opinion -
there's nothing wrong with sex or porn, as long as it's all well-informed,
safe, sane and consensual.

</offtopic>

------
Tomis02
I don't have a problem with changing the name but the motivation bothers me.
For years we've had unintuitive/unfriendly names - an example on this thread
was "pull requests", name picked by someone who was so high that he was seeing
himself from the 3rd person, in a mirror, while standing on their head.

God forbid we change the names so that they actually start making sense; oh
no, we stick with V1 til the heat death of the universe, we wouldn't want to
confuse already confused developers by fixing the dumb thing.

Ok, fine, now that you've started, will you fix the rest of the names too? The
ones that aren't politically charged, that is.

------
brnt
I've a Master of Science degree, will that chance too? Is anyone offended by
that terminology?

[Edit] maybe I should clarify: in my native language master only has the
connotation of mastery of a subject. A slave owner can't be called 'master',
so we don't have that unpleasant crossover.

~~~
minxomat
The line is always drawn somewhere, to answer the not very well veiled
slippery slope argument. If and when that applies to this specific case,
history will show. No one demands everything happen all at once.

~~~
brnt
I didn't try to make a slippery slope argument. I just want to know if someone
considers that title unpleasant, and if so what the alternative could be (not
Main of Science obviously).

~~~
MikeTheGreat
This could be an awesomely fun sub-thread.

Here's my ideas to get things started:

How about 'Science Wizard'? '<Your name here> The Science <Guy/Gal/Person>'
'Expert of Science'

What have the rest of you got? :)

~~~
brnt
There's really three titles, right? Bachelor, master and doctor. To me, the
first was always the weirdest if the bunch, and if we're renaming things,
maybe we could confer the hierarchy of the titles?

What's a good synonym for mastery? How can you describe someone who has
mastered something? Expert, OK. What else?

~~~
MikeTheGreat
In the US we've got 12 levels (years) of primary and secondary education,
followed by 'higher' education. Here at least I suppose you could call a
bachelor's something like "16th grade", or "Level 16". Different Masters and
PhDs require different numbers of years, though, so it's not a great system.

How about something like "Practitioner" instead of Bachelors, "Expert" instead
of Masters, and stick with Doctorate for the PhD?

------
ibobev
I suspect that it is not far away the day when the academic degree "master of
science" will also be renamed. :) It is complete insanity. We are starting to
live in Orwellian world. If you remember in 1984 the abonamation of the
language in a way to not allow wrong thinking was one of the characteristics
of the totalitarian government. :(

------
beebmam
I've always thought "master" was a weird name for the default branch

~~~
cyphar
The logic behind the name was that it was like a master record which all other
copies (branches) were based on. To be honest I think the original terminology
of "trunk" always made more sense given that we have things called "branches"
(and the first commit is called the "root commit").

But "main" is probably lees cryptic -- I will admit when I first heard the
term "trunk" I thought it was referring to either the UK term for suitcase or
US term for a car's boot. And of course git has a general principle of never
copying anything that SVN did, I guess that includes naming.

~~~
andreareina
IIRC git got "master" from BitKeeper.

------
627467
Performative activism. Master example of avoiding dealing with real issues.

~~~
spikeseltzer
What’s an example of a real issue, if changing terminology to make
underrepresented engineers feel less uncomfortable isn’t one?

~~~
627467
Are you implying that only non-underrepresented engineers are capable of
uncomfortable speech?

I'm sure any terminology can make some engineer (underrepresented or not)
uncomfortable. Therapy may help if it becomes recurrent and hard to manage.

I'm pretty sure most engineers, underrepresented or not, would appreciate a
healthy, dignifying and diverse management structure and workplace so that
uncomfortable language not only is less likely to naturally happen, but when
it does happen everyone (underrepresented or not) is adult enough to know if a
line was crossed.

I'm pretty sure that underrepresented groups would prioritize stopped being
randomly killed, be evicted, be massively encarcerated, be without healthcare
and be in a constant dog-eat-dog environment.

------
throwaway_bwicd
We already have a problem with frequent and, in many cases avoidable,
API/interface changes in our industry. Think about the last time you use some
library, then it's API changes, and you spend a day fixing this in your
codebase.

The fact that this change affects only new repos is not reassuring. There are
tons of tutorials, scripts and other stuff out there relying on the default
naming ("upstream" is the other branch name that is frequently used). Git is
already complex enough, especially for beginners.

Also, other git hosting services (and git itself) still use "master" as the
default branch name, which will create even more confusion.

------
zerocrates
Is there any movement on the Git side?

I'm assuming this doesn't actually apply if you follow the more "classic"
method of creating a Github repo: creating a local git repo and just adding
Github as a remote.

Edit: I figured that Git itself probably wouldn't change the default branch
name (at least not easily), but thought that just making it configurable would
be a "neutral" way to make it easier for people to do this if they wanted to.

I guess they, in fact, already did that:
[https://superuser.com/a/1572156](https://superuser.com/a/1572156)

~~~
nprateem
> Is there any movement on the Git side?

Why should there be?

------
jakelazaroff
This is a tiny change that has no substantial negative effect on anyone’s
life. If they’d renamed “pull requests” to “merge requests” no one would care,
at all. Let’s _please_ not make a big deal out of it.

~~~
unwoundmouse
You know, i highly doubt any developer black or not ever looked and said “wow
this master branch naming really makes me feel oppressed.” If this is you,
please correct me. However, i do know lots of developers have bash scripts,
terminal aliases, python workers that use the “master” terminology that will
need to be changed. This seems like an absurd and unnecessary change to me,
causing more net damage than benefit. Beyond git, i believe master is a power
dynamic that exists and is sometimes the best way to model a system - and we
should attempt to describe systems clearly unrelated to racism as accurately
as possible

~~~
madsmith
As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad.

Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this
attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems
like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.

I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the
meanings we currently associate to them.

~~~
tehlike
And it's all very us centric too.

In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is
essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been.
It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do
business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their
sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.

~~~
eesmith
GitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.

~~~
tehlike
So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't
have their roots in the racist history either.

~~~
eesmith
Because you wrote "it's all very us centric too" \- and I struggle to find out
how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American
multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American
interpretation of the words.

~~~
tehlike
But github caters to a global market. That's why replacing master->main is
just doing busy work that doesn't do anything to address the problem?

~~~
eesmith
That global market includes the US, which is a substantial part of GitHub's
revenue.

This thread started as madsmith's valid comment that "that language is dynamic
and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them" \-
how do we determine what meanings are associated with a given term? All
indications are that it has a US origin, which provides the appropriate
interpretation.

What is "the problem" and what should GitHub do to address the problem?

If the problem US-centric, and you think the US-only issues can be ignored
because GitHub caters to a global market, then isn't your logic that GitHub
should do nothing?

------
sceptical
Rename of master branch is happening at the company I work at. I find it
rather pointless but the company is paying for my time so if they want me to
spend time on this then fine by me.

I will still call it the master branch though.

------
userbinator
"Inclusivity includes idiocy."

If you've ever wondered why software quality has taken a nosedive in recent
years...

"At least we're diverse!"

Thanks for all the downvotes. The bias in here is really obvious. ;-)

------
bhaak
I don‘t mind renaming the default branch.

But I’ll see many tools breaking or bugs surfacing because they can’t find the
master branch.

One repository I used didn’t have a “master” branch but a “Master” branch.
That was annoying.

Git doesn’t have a concept of a main branch. Maybe we will get that now as a
result of GitHub’s change.

~~~
underyx
The has never been a guarantee that the main branch is called "master". No
tool should've been depending on the name of the main branch.

~~~
bhaak
You are technically correct.

In reality though you can't expect programmers to code for eventualities that
occur only in extremely rare cases (until now).

~~~
underyx
It's less rare than you think. Lots of repos use "develop", or "trunk" as
their default, for instance.

~~~
bhaak
Yes, many repositories use something else than "master" as their main
development branch.

But how many of those don't have a "master" branch at all?

------
dariosalvi78
Honest question: anyone here on HN from a black US background? How do you feel
about all this"political revisionism" of the tech jargon? I find it silly to
the point that it's offensive, but I'm not black and I don't live in the US.

~~~
thundergolfer
Not black or USA nationality, but this is not revisionism. The origin of the
term in gut is in the master/slave concept and because that’s an ugly (and
pointless) association the term is _evolving_.

Terms change. We will adapt just fine, and “main” is a better name anyway, as
others have pointed out here in this thread.

~~~
dariosalvi78
The change of the name is not motivated by a better semantical fitness, it's
motivated exclusively by the recent, and well justified, political movements
in the US. People out there are asking to be treated like human beings and not
shot by the police and all they get is a change of a word that has absolutely
nothing to do with their conditions or context. Nothing changes for
developers, true, but absolutely nothing changes for black people in the US
neither. I find it an hypocrisy, which is why I don't like it.

------
jaimex2
Wonder if Microsoft will be renaming the main character of their Halo games
too :)

~~~
valand
No, it's trunk chief

------
jaimex2
Lets take bets on the next white guilt label change:

I'm betting Master Chef or Master degrees.

------
astraloverflow
The etymology of "master" according to Wiktionary:

From Middle English maister, mayster, meister, from Old English mǣster,
mæġster, mæġester, mæġister, magister (“master”), from Latin magister (“chief,
teacher, leader”), from Old Latin magester, from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s,
(as in magnus (“great”)) + -ester/-ister

~~~
crooked-v
An etymology of the phrases predating this specific use of 'master' (such as
'master recording') might be helpful, but the word 'master' by itself really
isn't.

------
ykevinator
This is probably a good idea. Nothing else is working.

------
nprateem
"Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will
be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove
unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms."

FFS. Is this some kind of joke? This sort of PC bullshit is gold for
rightwingers.

~~~
luckylion
> This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers.

I believe a lot of people realize that, and that's why it was flagged.

------
non-entity
I'm having trouble understanding why this was flagged. It covers a major
change to tool many (most?) developers use including time and reasoning. It's
straight to the point, doesn't seem to seem to have much fluff, and isn't
really trained with author's option / ideology. Surely much worse and off
topic political articles reach the front page without being mass flagged.

On a random note, I've had vouch for flagged articles / comments before but it
seems to very irregular. What decides if the "vouch" option is available to a
user?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
A lot of people are tired of seeing "culture wars" threads, including most
likely the mods, since they seem to devolve into a mess of bickering posts.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it. I'm tired of these threads too but
to express no opinion is to allow others to drive the direction of changes
that affect our industry.

