
GitHub renaming default branch to “main” - Udik
https://twitter.com/Una/status/1271180494944829441
======
merricksb
Several discussions here in the past few days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093)
(138 points/224 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123)
(127 points/206 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813)
(44 points/84 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859)
(15 points/5 comments)

------
illuminati1911
This is what happens when you bow down on everything the ”I’m so offended by
<insert some random bullshit here>” -people whine about.

I guess I better get rid of my Master’s degree before some people think I’m a
slave owner.

~~~
klyrs
You see it as bowing down. I see it as standing tall and making a principled
choice -- not because it's going to save the world, but because the change has
essentially zero cost and sends a positive message; despite the outcry of
people who are offended by such things.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
It's an empty gesture that requires negligible effort or sacrifice for largely
zero effect on the actual problem; basically the progressives' equivalent of
"thoughts and prayers". Moreover, it adds a inconvenience, albeit minor, to
those outside the United States who are not a party to this debate at all.

We're not against anti-racism, we're anti-nonsense and this is just about as
nonsensical as it gets. Actual effort to solve the very real problems that the
US faces with regard to race would involve donations of money and staff time
to help out minorities, enough to cause some level of financial stinging. If
these organizations did that, that would be actually worthy of praise.

------
ng12
I think it's important to note that master has no relation to master/slave.
It's master as in master copy or master key.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
You are mistaken. The terminology came from BitKeeper, which did use the terms
in the sense of master and slave repositories:
[https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-
list/2019-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-
list/2019-May/msg00066.html)

In any case, the git dev responsible for the choice has made their views
known:
[https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577)

~~~
ccurrens
The git dev responsible for the choice has said it had nothing to do with
master/slave:

> "master" as in e.g. "master recording". Perhaps you could say the original,
> but viewed from the production process perspective.

> A clueless Central European youngster whose command of English was mostly
> illusory came up with the term, which is why it isn't very obvious...

[https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=20](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441?s=20)

I always thought it meant "master copy"...

------
tarkin2
It's a nice gesture but it's silly.

There are multiple definitions of 'master'. This has no connotation with
master and slave. My other branches are not someone inferior to the master
branch, and the master branch does not command the other branches. The other
branches are normally an improvement on master, and master is usually
transformed to resemble another branch.

If you want to fight systematic racism in society, changing the word master,
when master has nothing to do with master/slave, seems a nice gesture, but
rather kneejerk, and forces people to do a lot more work, all because someone
failed to use a dictionary, which causes annoyance rather than a change of
mindset.

------
tych0
Say what you will about the motivations for changing the name, but why-oh-why
did they choose "main"? "trunk" continues the tree analogy ("branch") much
better...

~~~
jansan
Trunk would have been the best choice from the beginning.

Maybe elephants will be offended by this name? Who knows.

------
dec0dedab0de
Anybody else think it's a nice gesture, but cringing at the thought of
updating all your deploy scripts?

~~~
im3w1l
What I expect them to do is leave automation & api as they are, and only
change what happens when you use github web ui. But you never know I guess.

------
sosuke
This tweet from the person who claims to have selected the master branch name
laments his choice.
[https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577](https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577)

If he wants to change it from master to main/upstream I'm on board. _shrug_

If something this ... inconsequential to me can make some folks more
comfortable I don't care. Think of it this way, it saves 2 bytes! Course
upstream then takes those bytes from origin. So it is a wash after all.

~~~
waheoo
Im yet to see anyone on hn say it will make them more comfortable. Just a
bunch of white knights coming to do thier song and dance.

------
fabriq3
I personally don't have a problem with renaming master to main or so. These
are just terms, and I lived with `master` branches and `main` branch won't
bring me any harm, if this actually helps people to feel more comfortable.

What bothers me a lot, that a group of people basically decide for the whole
world, cultures and countries how should they feel about things. This clearly
was a case with Rubocop renaming, where bunch of developers aggressively
attacked Bulgarian maintainer [0] to rename Rubocop library because of the
`cop` part. They obviously didn't care, that in many other countries police is
actually protecting people and is being respected. And argument of "(in US)
the word "cop" has an uncomfortable feeling about it" was enough to outweigh
the arguments of maintainer, that renaming would bring a lot of problems and
breaking changes.

[0] - [https://github.com/rubocop-
hq/rubocop/issues/8091](https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091)

~~~
apta
> that a group of people basically decide for the whole world, cultures and
> countries how should they feel about things

Hopefully people see now the plight of the Palestenians citizens of other
regions in that area, about what the West did to them post WWII.

------
risho
it seems ironic to me that the people who are complaining about others being
offended are usually the people who are most offended.

~~~
jansan
The only people of color that I could spot in the discussion were against the
change. Some Asians were especially annoyed by the proposed change.

Looks like a cult-like group of white SJW developers within GitHub/Microsoft
have painted themselves into a corner with this suggestion. It will be
difficult to get out of this situation without losing face or causing more
damage.

~~~
risho
honestly who cares. this change is so benign.

~~~
waheoo
Chsnging a branch name is benign? You really cant see how that could cause
problems for software?

I know its the default bit there will be a bunch of people that go in and
change it for the sake of virtue only to expect dependent libraroes to
manually go in and fix things. Which, wont happen.

------
zerofourhundred
This is as useful as a picture of water to a person stranded in a desert.

------
HiddenCanary
The domain "Maincard.com" just became very valuable. For when Mastercard has
to change its name too.

------
hirundo
Isn't the word "pork" offensive to some halal or kosher developers?

[https://github.com/search?q=pork](https://github.com/search?q=pork) <\- 800
results

Since such name changes impose a lot of breakage and work downstream, we
should find an objective way to designate which ones are necessary. An example
could be an ongoing github poll, with the results averaged over years to
prevent fads from creating work. A code of conduct could specify that if more
than x% of the userbase over y years vote that <word> is offensive, it would
be scheduled for deprecation in major version +1 and removal in +2.

------
jansan
The discussion on this issue for git for windows got really heated and then
shut down. It looks like a massacre now (scroll all the way down to see the
massacre):

[https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/2674](https://github.com/git-
for-windows/git/issues/2674)

~~~
gregmac
It's crazy how much effort people expend fighting against this.

No one is asking you to do development work to make it happen. No one is
forcing you to update your repositories or change your workflow. You're free
to continue using whatever names you want for branches in your own
repositories.

If other people want to do this change and are the ones doing it, why spend so
much time getting so heated about it?

~~~
amSNAY
I would not get worked up about it if it came from individual OSS projects,
out of their own free will, one by one.

However, in several OSS projects I follow, it was always corporate steered
"open" source devs who "proposed" the change and rammed it through, often
against the majority opinion. To further their careers and stroke their egos.

Now GitHub, who still does business with sketchy companies (as does MSFT) does
this entirely meaningless virtue signalling change.

Just to show OSS devs who is the boss and that they can do whatever they like
with their money.

~~~
Larrikin
All of these meaningless gestures to you add up over time. A single company
supporting BLM was untenable when the NFL players were doing their protests
but they continued. The current protests were considered meaningless but they
continued and are effecting change in society and also in legislation. The
small things actually matter and it seems this small gesture matters to a lot
of people on here even as they continue to say it's meaningless because
removing references to slavery actually isn't meaningless.

------
lousken
what's next? will master degrees become something else? these changes are
utterly stupid and don't help anything

------
mothsonasloth
Utopia has been achieved!

We haven't solved lots of computational problems or made the internet and
computing more usable/available to everyone, but not to worry, we changed the
naming standards on a tool used by a small subset of the worlds population to
placate an even smaller subset of loud and vitriolic people.

~~~
waheoo
> "If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the
> tech community, feels like a no-brainer to me," she wrote.

I agree with the sentiment, but oh sweet summer child. You cant make decisions
off of what one person feels. That barely scales up to work with just one
person.

------
tomku
Flagged - this is a link to someone asking Github to change their policy, and
Nat Friedman's response saying they will
([https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312))
is non-trivial to find in the resulting thread because Twitter has made their
site nearly unusable.

Could we get some mod action to change the link? Either to Friedman's response
(which would show the original question above, since it's a reply) or to
something like
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53050955](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53050955)
?

Edit: Or if it's a dupe submission of something that's been beaten to death on
HN several already, maybe it's not worth fixing.

------
waheoo
I wonder how many websites are going to break over this when everyones master
branch imports break.

I, know, default, still, some idiot's gonna break something big with this.

------
Emanation
Man, when technicality is used as a basis for such a change you have to wonder
how vain the people who push for it are

------
unethical_ban
I am on board with a lot of changes, even symbolic, to assuage issues of
discrimination in culture.

This feels like "Okay, we know this isn't a big deal, but 60 Minutes is going
to run a segment on "Master/Slave" hard drives and Twitter is going to blow up
if we don't fix this".

Like spoken elsewhere, the "master" branch is not the opposite of a "slave"
branch. Those who are triggered would be showing their ignorance at the
etymology, and it seems Github is just getting ahead of an outrage storm.

------
whymauri
Is there anything more official than a tweet? Like an official statement?

~~~
013a
Bad link. This is just some random person on Twitter asking about it. No
relation to Github.

Nat does have a reply buried in the responses; that should have been linked.

------
pyfgcrl123
I suggest they go protest chess tournaments. There they have not just masters
but also grandmasters. And while we're at it, let's ban the might and magic
series on the same grounds.

~~~
jansan
Did you know that the initial rank at chess is grandslave? /s

------
pyfgcrl123
They should go protest chess tournaments, there they have not just masters but
also grandmasters. And while they're at it, call for banning Might and Magic
series on the same grounds.

------
anxlp
I'm offended by the octopussy. That is really problematic. Can that be removed
as well?

~~~
pndy
But she was a beautiful Bond villain...

------
lupinglade
Smh. Great progress.

------
Arete314159
Can we also stop using master/slave:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_\(technology\))

