
GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main' - drummer
https://mobile.twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312
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firloop
Dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093)

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bonzini
If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading
comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.

(I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is
completely irrelevant to git).

~~~
adjkant
Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and
some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just
say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that
association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which
again many places do).

Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations
that people basically can't avoid.

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kylebyproxy
> that people basically can't avoid

This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have
for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying
"people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen.
It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time
to practice decent cognitive hygiene.

Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see
this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication
of their views going forward.

Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the
self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like
GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world.

Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass
that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common
denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?

~~~
adjkant
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how psychology works. "Cognitive
hygiene" is not something most people have, if any. To claim you have it is
quite arrogant to most of psychological research.

> Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see
> this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as
> vindication of their views going forward.

This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as
those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a
small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if
anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate
Github starting the process and conversation here.

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tomxor
Git init defaults to master, i don't care what it's called but why are they
diverging from git defaults?

This will just add yet another inconsistency to confuse newbies as they
transition from using github directly to plain git cli... The more cynical
side of me would think that may even be intentional.

~~~
gear54rus
Pray that git doesn't fall victim to the same disease. That might cause an
avalanche of stupidity like this one among VCS web GUIs.

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jjuhl
When will all this political correctness and social justice warrior nonsense
stop? Just because a word _can_ be used in a way that causes offense, doesn't
mean that it's always used that way. Also, people need to relax a bit and not
hunt down things that could potentially offend so aggressively. Take it easy,
if something offensive was intended you'll probably know from the surrounding
context - stop shooting down individual words.

~~~
thu2111
It won't stop until companies start refusing to hire leftist activists, or
take investment from them, and fire the ones that do sneak through the hiring
process.

A lot of this bullying evaporates when there's some risk involved in doing it,
but that doesn't happen because companies are filled with people that have no
strong moral foundation to their lives. So they aren't really sure if they're
good people and easily pushed around by anyone who comes along and says with
conviction and clarity, "you are a good person if you do X and a terrible bad
evil person if you don't".

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loceng
Is this related to master-slave? Master-slave in programming has nothing to do
with humans, the contexts are separate. What's it say about society if people
are unable to differentiate, separate the language in two contexts?

~~~
holler
It says that our world has descended into utter madness.

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PureParadigm
"Master," in many contexts, need not be associated with slavery. You can be a
(grand)master at chess without having any slaves. You can have a master's
degree without having any slaves. In the case of git, I don't think there is a
clear connection to slavery either (the non-master branches are typically
referred to as feature or development branches). So unless chess grandmasters
and master's degrees are going to also change names, I don't see why git needs
to.

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m0zg
Not enough. Master branch should be deleted outright. Then go in and pattern
match the word "slave" in people's code and delete that as well (including all
prior revisions). Only then will systemic racism be fully abolished. /s

At the speed this is going, I'm beginning to worry about my master's degree,
male/female connectors, and color coding in electrical code.

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verroq
This is getting really stupid now. Who are these people? At the risk of
invoking the slippery slope, they will _never_ be satisfied.

Will the silent majority bend over to these extremists on Twitter?

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cczizou
What if we already went down a slippery slope by permitting racist language to
permeate culture and making things right requires an equally slippery slope?
Could this be the reality we live in now?

I would contend, however, that those who are trying to combat racism and it’s
markings in our culture are in more of an uphill climb.

~~~
verroq
You’re right, we should remove the words from the language such that not even
“racist” concepts can be expressed. An act of daring of such thought itself
should be a crime. In fact we should call this new language: newspeak.

~~~
cczizou
This story is about a business (Github) deciding to change language in their
product that could carry racist connotations. It’s not about criminalizing
racist language.

~~~
verroq
Except this usage doesn’t and has never had racist connotations. If one
wilfully chooses to misinterpret the meaning of words then that is on them.

Much the same way RMS did not defend Epstein. Truth is often the first
casualty.

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hastes
Pure lunacy, hope this turns out to be a joke.

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VWWHFSfQ
I feel like this will break a very significant amount of tooling

~~~
akerro
Now that consider all tools need to support new non-offensive terminology and
old racist terminology used in existing projects

~~~
VWWHFSfQ
I'm saying that every tool/service that integrates with Github will now have
to know whether the "default" branch is called master or main. Bugs will be
caused by that and a lot of services will break.

~~~
herbstein
They already had to know that. Plenty of repos use `develop` as their primary
branch name.

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johnlbevan2
I'd say "blacklist" and "whitelist" are more offensive / have a stronger
argument of colour being used to discriminate (albeit not directly related to
races) / would be better to have "deny list" and "allow list".

"Race condition" is just as offensive as "Master Branch" \- neither are
relating to prejudice / historic injustice; but use different meanings of
these potentially loaded words.

That said, nothing against switching to non-loaded terms; especially if the
effort to do so is less than the effort to debate it. But we mustn't accuse
people of being racist just because they're using terminology that some are
offended by when those using the terminology are simply using terminology
they've learnt, and could have no reasonable expectation to have considered
that it may be deemed offsensive.

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slap
Masterdegrees and master bedrooms are next on the list.

The virtue signalling can't stop right now.

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adjkant
Perhaps a better broader link than a single tweet without context:
[https://www.cnet.com/news/master-and-slave-tech-terms-
face-s...](https://www.cnet.com/news/master-and-slave-tech-terms-face-
scrutiny-amid-anti-racism-efforts/)

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aayala
People need to fix the real problems, words are just words, please analyze the
intentions and context.

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vulcan01
So now I have to replace all the "master"s in my aliases to "main"... except I
have to switch back when I work on an older repository.

Yay.

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beager
I have no problem with folks doing this but it feels like hollow, performative
grandstanding that allows tech folk to feel like they’re helping without doing
anything that will make them truly uncomfortable. How many companies will do
this but continue to let talent pipeline issues languish, or neglect
unconscious biases create an uneven playing field for employees?

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Jonnax
master isn't a special branch right?

Like I know some projects set their default branch as develop.

Also the set upstream command, that let's you have a local branch name
different from remote, right?

~~~
jjuhl
"master" is a special name. For one, it's the branch that git will initially
check out after you clone a repository.

~~~
kcolford
No, git checks out whatever branch the remote points HEAD to

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smegmasamurai
'main' doesn't seem like a good solution if this is really what they're going
to do. it might just be me but a 'master' branch in some repos might not be
equal to what you could consider a 'main' branch.

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filoeleven
I’d like to see the Venn diagram of (people who are complaining about renaming
‘master’ to ‘main’) and (people who complain about misspelling ‘lose’ as
‘loose’, “it’s” as “its”, etc).

I don’t have a fully-formed idea of what I’m getting at yet, but I suspect
that the overlap is high, and it seems inconsistent. Like for “master”,
especially when coupled with “slave”, the expectation is that the context of
its usage in computing makes it clear that this has nothing to do with humans
claiming to own other humans. But use “loose” where “lose” is the right word,
and you’re gonna get a snide or “helpful” response about the misspelling, even
though the context makes it perfectly clear what the intended meaning was in
the vast majority of cases.

~~~
andrenth
I’d like to see a Venn diagram of (people claiming the word master can offend
someone) and (people actually offended by the word master). I suspect the
overlap is nonexistent.

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yunruse
I saw a great point mentioned elsewhere on Twitter that an even better
methodology is to use "prod" and "dev", as it makes the intent that little bit
clearer.

~~~
akerro
But we already follow git-flow and have master, prod, staging and dev branches

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beirut_bootleg
The term "main" is a trigger to non-lead developers.

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k__
Awesome.

Let's do this industry wide and never talk about it again.

~~~
holler
better yet, why don't we just strike the word "master" from the English
language, that way no mortal will make the mistake ever again?

~~~
k__
I think, context is the point here.

It's like with content that is needlessly sexualized. We should keep stuff
like that to the context it belongs.

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Papirola
remember factorybot ?

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axegon_
Even existing projects??? No, that's not going to break tons of stuff and
tooling built and running on production around "master" /s

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Jonnax
Has someone said that's what they're doing? Have you seen more information
about this change?

Because the link here is just saying "that's a good idea and we're working on
it" in response to someone asking about changing the default branch name.

Like default sounds like new project creation time.

~~~
axegon_
That's what I'm asking. I mean there are probably tons and tons of custom
built tools, ci/cd's around the current default "master" branch. It would be
awesome to wake up and see a ton of alarms and all builds and deployments
failing, wouldn't it.

~~~
Jonnax
In that case. It's very likely to be done to existing projects.

Creating a different branch requires commiting to the repo, at least from what
I understand.

And and branch name is just a text field.

