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GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

zdnet.com

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Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#211

Post by ironmagma »

anaphor wrote: post #196

I don't think "main" is a good replacement because it loses the notion of it being a branch where the finalized and production ready code goes. It could just as easily mean "where we do all the work" (i.e. trunk based development, which I also dislike the name of), and I think that's potentially confusing to new people even more than "master" (although not as offensive to some people apparently). If I'm going to rena…

Master doesn’t necessarily imply “production,” either, though. It could be that master is where the latest work is, but “prod” is where production ready code should be merged into. All of these branch names’ meanings are arbitrary.

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#212

Post by ironmagma »

sand_castles wrote: post #24

Wait, 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.

Git isn’t a great role model, however. It still uses the “blame” terminology which ascribes a needlessly negative and confrontational tone whenever you need to tell someone how you discovered the author of a line of code from your team’s codebase. This kind of vocabulary debt is something we should be paying off more of, more regularly, since it’s just as important — arguably more important — than functionality.

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#213

Post by ironmagma »

madmulita wrote: post #48

Great, so "main" now means "master"? So, what's the difference?

The difference is that one piece of progress has been made toward building an ecosystem of tooling that doesn’t pointlessly alienate people. Some day, the effects of small changes like this will add up to serve us well with supporting a broad variety of team members with whom we can work and learn from.

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#214

Post by jasonlfunk »

jb0x168 wrote: post #164
idiocratic wrote: post #133

I'm a very anti-racist and anti-fascist person. I'm in favour of removing slavers and white supremacists statues. But these silly debates in the tech world makes me cringe a little and I wish our community was different. Isn't it of little importance how a branch is named? Let's focus on politics, on inclusion, on essential debates that our societies need to improve and let's not waste our energies changing stupid li…

Just curious: are you also a member of one of the groups impacted by these terms?

Why would that matter?

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#215

Post by eeh »

Seb-C wrote: post #209

This is getting ridiculous and annoying. When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years. American people are projecting their very own and specific segregation problems onto the whol…

> When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years.

Yes, slavery has been around for a long time in many countries, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve our terminology.

> Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works.

This vocabulary hasn't been forbidden. The word is still used, it's just not used re Github.

That said, I consider Github's proposed change to be virtue signaling. Was anybody actually upset at this, or are changes being made just because they can be?

Update: Let me know who disagrees with what. I've disagreed with points made on both sides, so maybe that guarantees ire?

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#216

Post by quattrofan »

Ridiculous. What exactly is this going to achieve? It's not like using the words with this meaning "celebrate" racism. For those like me who are liberals I can tell you this crap will guarantee populists like Trump continue to get into power.

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#218

Post by coronadisaster »

derefr wrote: post #16

I 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…

Wouldn't mother be sexist? ....

Re: GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

#220

Post by AndrewOMartin »

j_4 wrote: post #179
Accacin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be 100% honest, when I first read the changes to whitelist/blacklist I thought, "Well, that's pretty stupid" but after reading your comment and a few others, it does actually seem quite racist. Like someone else mentioned, without the racist connotations I wouldn't know whether black or white list was the 'good' one. Language evolves constantly, always has and always will do. I'm not going to get hung up on things…

>without the racist connotations I wouldn't know whether black or white list was the 'good' one. Please. Humans are diurnal animals, and we depend on sight as our main sense. The idea of light good, dark bad is present in infants. It's likely much older than consciousness. I'm not denying that there's an unfortunate racist element correlated with it all, with the trend over the past few centuries being pale-skinned p…

> Humans are diurnal animals.

Humans, maybe. But programmers?

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