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GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
81–90 of 251 posts
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. This is more like a swear word. No one would expect that calling it the "fuck" branch would be OK. Just because more people are OK with "master" doesn't change the fact that it bothers other people who are just trying to code. This isn't hard to understand.
Well, "git" is a swear word in British English. "a foolish or worthless person", per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git
If people are offended by "git" and want to advocate for a name change, they are free to do so.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#83I always understood a VCS “master” branch to be in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing, which in turn is a use of a sense of the verb “to master” akin to “to master one’s courage”—not conveying dominance, but rather the reaching of an apex in skill. If you’re in the market for a replacement that keeps the metaphorical power, though, I might suggest having a “mother” branch. “Mother…
>in reference to “master” records / the “mastering” process of audio mixing
That analogy doesn't really make sense, because audio mastering is more like cutting a release branch. The way git uses it is more equivalent to "trunk" in SVN.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#84I'm surprised it wasn't called "main" given it was all C wizards who developed git in the first place.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#85"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." George Orwell, 1984
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#86> but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list." Seriously?
Without the racist background, how does one know which list does which? The new names actually describe what they do. The reason it may seem ridiculous is that racism is very, very deep in American culture. The country's culture goes back hundreds of years and is still slowly working on being less so. Here's an example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342...
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Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#87I know this is going to be a PC war, but, I'm curious how they technically intend to do this. Is "main" just going to be a visual alias on the site? If so that will be really confusing if the branch is still technically called "master" and needs to be referred to that way in the command line. If they intend to actually rename the branches I don't know how they can do that without breaking all sorts of scripts and bui…
Well git internally is a directed acyclic graph of filesystem changes, and branches are just tags on nodes. Master is just a convention-based name for the default branch when the repo is first created, but it could be called anything. The only way that scripts would break would be if they explicitly listed master, and that should be able to be changed (or git could fall back by reserving both master and main as meaning the "Default" branch and either branch name was interoperable in the command set). That would only break cases where users were also using "main" to mean something else.
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#88[deleted]
Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
#89Wait, git by default creates master branch. So if you push master to Github, how is this going to work ? Is it not better to make the changes to Git ? Ask Linus Torvald in Finland.
Ask Linus, who is in Oregon