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GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

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Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#81

Post by andrenth »

filoeleven wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#82

Post by h_r »

filoeleven wrote: post #76
bonzini wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you did there, but I still cannot understand your question. I am not bothered by common English spelling mistakes, if that's what you were asking.

I made another comment that is more descriptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong. Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but th…

I'm genuinely curious if there are black or African American programmers who actually use git who are offended by the term. Speaking for myself (white programmer) it just seems to be an obvious use of the adjective form of the word as either the principal branch (like master bath) or the branch from which other branches are copied (as in the initial, pristine version). If there are such comments I haven't come across them yet.

There are several comments by other white people who see this as a highly commendable act. Does anyone actually subject to racism see this move as a positive step that addresses a real problem?

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#84

Post by verroq »

cczizou wrote: post #70
verroq wrote: post #11

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?

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.

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.

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#85

Post by cczizou »

verroq wrote: post #84
cczizou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#86

Post by baggy_trough »

verroq wrote: post #11

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?

"Silent majority" is an offensive term to the dumb.

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#87

Post by bonzini »

filoeleven wrote: post #76
bonzini wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you did there, but I still cannot understand your question. I am not bothered by common English spelling mistakes, if that's what you were asking.

I made another comment that is more descriptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong. Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but th…

I don't think niggardly is a word worth popularizing more, and I can certainly see someone (probably someone that is bothered by "loose" vs "lose") using it for kicks. But that's mostly because, as you point out, it's quite archaic.

I agree with your hypothesis with respect to master/slave, in fact. In this case the word master has nothing to do with slavery though.

An equivalent to removing "master" from git is removing Spanish names of colors from crayons to avoid having "black" and... "the n-word" written next to each other.

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#88

Post by thu2111 »

jjuhl wrote: post #34

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 indi…

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".

Re: GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main'

#90

Post by herbstein »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #22
akerro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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