Because of the whole "master" meaning a slave owner thing that the progressive left seems to think it means and it apparently hurt enough feelings to make it a movement (default main branch on Github repos is now also "main" because of this), and then you have companies that desperately try to be hip and cool, and they do this to get social clout. The whole thing is pretty sad if you ask me, but what do I know.
I'm on board for removing 'master-slave' terminology from peripherals and replication terminology. I'm on board for removing blacklist/whitelist. But "master" has other meanings besides subjugation. In particular, proficiency or perfection. It was always my sense that git master branch was meant in the same sense as 'gold master' in recording and duplication, or 'master piece' in art and skilled labor.
That said, branches come from trunks, not master or main, and it always felt like a bit of fuckery that git changed the subversion terminology that most of the eventual target audience was already familiar with. Changing to "main" is just confidently incorrect grandstanding. If you're gonna 'fix it' then bloody well fix it.
Git got "master" from closed source SCM Bitkeeper (the Linux kernel team never used Subversion) which did have a concept of "slave" branches as it used master/slave style replication. It's an unfortunate default closer in originating usage to the peripheral and replication terminology than the "pristine copy" terminology.
Changing to "main" is often as much for not breaking a lot of people's muscle memory of "ma<tab>" in the CLI as any other reason to name the default/main branch that. "default" is a good name, too. If you want to use SVN's "trunk" go for it, that's a good name. At this point most git tools don't care what you call it.
I keep going back and forth about whether I should respond to this, so I just upvoted you instead, but now I'm third-guessing myself.
If that's actually the case about BitKeeper then 1) what the fuck, guys, and 2) I'll be thinking hard before I roll out that little rant again. Standing next to a bad actor, you have to gauge your behavior more carefully, because a reasonable response now has additional connotations. Laughing at a joke changes depending on who is telling the joke, for instance.
The part I still feel fairly confident about though is that it feels like someone needs to tap the brakes. It feels like we're on the brink of going too far with this one. And I don't necessarily mean 'witch hunt' style, although that thought has occurred to me more than once. I mean more like diminishing returns and backlash. Maybe we should be wrapping this up and looking for a new problem to fix? Or at least asking the question. Perfect is the enemy of the good, and we haven't really achieved 'good'.
It wasn't the worst mistake that Bitkeeper made in its history. Bitkeeper is going to be an interesting historical footnote for the mistake of dropping the Linux kernel and subsequently prompting the creation of both Mercurial and git.
> Maybe we should be wrapping this up and looking for a new problem to fix?
I feel that we mostly are. It's barely an aside in these release notes and most of the comments are just people still antagonistic to the change, but at this point all the major git repo hosts have made the change for when you init new repos and even new base installs of git itself when you go to git init either have the new default or prompt you (depending on which distro you install, I believe). Like I said, "main" isn't the "perfect choice" but for most of the git tools builders (the major hosts, and git itself) it's good enough and has wide enough support it's "the winner" and has been for several months now. But the tools themselves are happy to let you still use the old default if you don't feel like migrating or personal choices if you don't like the new default. It's all "good enough", and not trying to be perfect.
Renaming branches is mostly just a folder rename, so what harm does it do to just rename the branches? (If it causes some small feeling of harm reduction/justice for those that do object to the old default name, isn't that reason enough?) I'm going to quietly rename branches when I see fit. I'm also not going to force anyone to rename branches if they don't feel like it. That seems to be where most of the tools have landed, no one's forcing the name change, many are suggesting it, but as an action itself it's barely a footnote in Release Notes.
At this point it seems increasingly silly to relitigate why we should stick with the old default instead of just shrugging and moving on to the new one. I don't think your rant was specifically designed to relitigate that, which is why I replied to yours specifically with added context that I thought you might find useful, but some of the other comments in the thread are more questionably about that. The decision has been made: by major corporations listening to their Diversity and Inclusion boards, by the git mailing list itself and even including the developer that chose "master" in the first place without any malicious intent behind it and in general more because of "momentum" than intent, etc. The remaining, recurring complaints seem more about political parties and "anti-virtue signaling" as much as anything technical. (Those same complaints suggest that renaming branches/folders is just "virtue signaling", so complaining about "virtue" as a goal seems it can only be "anti-virtue", right? Our language has gotten so corrupted by social media.)
It takes a few minutes to switch. Maybe a bit more to rebind all CI scripts etc in a project as large as react. There are some things that I don't fully get (slavery was never big in my country).
It takes a few minutes of effort to not be an asshole (real or perceived), so I just do it rather than thinking to much about whether or not the wider population should be offended or not.
We do not have a monorepo, and you can practically watch the gears turn when we mention any process change that involves changing the CI scripts. And this part may be projection, but I am nearly certain I see people subconsciously avoiding solutions that involve systemic CI changes.
I got tired of making clerical errors or helping others fix theirs and went through and moved a bunch of configuration out of our CI configs into source control. So for my projects making changes is easier, but I still bump into mature projects that still have the old patterns because nobody even wanted to edit the configs one last time.
I fully understand not changing for that reason and don't think anyone would think less of a justifiably difficult situation.
But at the same time, what you described is probably indicative of deeper issues which should be considered technical debt, not because of political correctness but because there may be other inflexibility which inhibit productivity in the future.
Not wanting to be seen as an asshole is how we end up with a never ending stream of bullshit because no one is brave enough to stand up. How much time has been wasted on feel good crap that serves only to give the illusion of caring.
Big tech is happy to rename their git branches while doing nothing about the actual evil they commit.
You seem upset? Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab have all switched to main, together. You know who isn't upset? The git community or the person that introduced the master concept or the people who know you can name your default branch to anything in under 30 seconds.
There is nothing wrong with trying to use more inclusive language regardless of said reasons, and to be honest main is actually a better name anyways.
I'd say it's not even only a racial issue (but predominately was/is in the United States), but a socioeconomic one, with racial correlations.
There are plenty of modern day indentured servitude exploitations afoot: the leaked internal Amazon documents about it being business policy to keep engineering hires for less than two years, while preserving managers who fire them, is an example that springs to mind.
Is it still the case that Amazon gives new hires a hiring bonus that has to be paid back if they don't stay at the company for a set amount of time? If you're also targeting fresh college grads...
That's not exactly indentured servitude but it's too close to the Island of Pleasure (Pinocchio) for my comfort.
Which part of that meandering article should make me "want to guess again"?
Though I like this sentence: "So it’s not so surprising that the masterminds at Sears came up with the master plan: As masters of their craft, they mastered the art of capturing the imagination of the American homebuyer."
When commenting about contentious topics like this, IMO you should try to be as inclusive as possible. Slavery has harmed people of all complexions and it creates unnecessary divisions when you discard the trauma of so many people who have suffered under it.
In technology master was always paired with slave, so yes, the word master in technology does indeed imply the meaning of slave owner.
I do agree that getting that bent out of shape about the semantics of the names of inanimate objects like git branches is a bit weird, but then I am also talking from a position of privilege and have no lived experience of being treated differently because of my ancestry. The way I figure: if some people care that much that it is called “main” and not “master”, and I don’t really care either way, why not let them have that one?
