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

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

#241

Post by [deleted] »

Rochus wrote: post #240
dang wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You posted the quote as a top-level comment with no other information ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518702 ). That was obviously ideological flamebait, and really a form of name-calling, so it was rightly flagged. Also, it's a red herring to bring up the fact that your top-level comment was flagged, when you degenerated into outrageous violations of the guidelines later in the thread. You can't do that, an…

As you can see, I am here under my real identity. I would not intentionally do what you are accusing me of here; and even having read your guidelines for several times now, and although I have also studied law and am used to reading and understanding regulations, I would not have come to the conclusion that my actions violate them; it's certainly not "obvious". At least now I understand how you interpret your guideli…

[deleted]

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

#242

Post by tchaffee »

cameronbrown wrote: post #235
tchaffee wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to rewrite parts the language because a few people are offended? No I don't. I want to use the word denylist instead of blacklist. So do other people and companies. Other words have gone in and out of fashion without rewriting parts of the language. Yes, the slippery slope logical fallacy definitely applies here. You are greatly exaggerating what's happening or what could happen as the result of using a wo…

> The continued use of the word black to mean "evil" in the workplace and white to mean "good" while those terms both also apply to people's race is the history of the past few decades. Humongous strawman. Blacklists aren't inherently 'bad', but you've applied that label to it. You could just as easily argue that blacklists are good, i.e. prevent DoS attacks or spam. Conversely you can argue that whitelists are good.…

Again, I'm not changing the language. It's using one word instead of another. Big companies have already replaced "blacklist" with "denylist" long ago, and you are going to see more and more of this as time goes on. There is zero onus on me. I just have to watch it happen. The onus is on you to catch up with and understand why companies are doing it. Most people who don't like social change are going to write it off and dismiss it. But if you want to know the real motivations and positive impact it has, you can learn.

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

#243

Post by cameronbrown »

tchaffee wrote: post #242
cameronbrown wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The continued use of the word black to mean "evil" in the workplace and white to mean "good" while those terms both also apply to people's race is the history of the past few decades. Humongous strawman. Blacklists aren't inherently 'bad', but you've applied that label to it. You could just as easily argue that blacklists are good, i.e. prevent DoS attacks or spam. Conversely you can argue that whitelists are good.…

Again, I'm not changing the language. It's using one word instead of another. Big companies have already replaced "blacklist" with "denylist" long ago, and you are going to see more and more of this as time goes on. There is zero onus on me. I just have to watch it happen. The onus is on you to catch up with and understand why companies are doing it. Most people who don't like social change are going to write it off…

Blacklist to denylist is a very recent thing. Believe me, I've been watching this happen over the past few weeks. There's been talk for a long time but these changes are recent, and clearly a response to American politics right now.

I'm not denying positive motivations, I'm just skeptical of the actual impact, which is why we're having this discussion. I'm happy to be convinced, but these ideas aren't holding up to my personal scrutiny and I do not think I'm an isolated case.

Learning is about attacking ideas to prove their merit, as well.

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

#244

Post by tchaffee »

cameronbrown wrote: post #243
tchaffee wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I'm not changing the language. It's using one word instead of another. Big companies have already replaced "blacklist" with "denylist" long ago, and you are going to see more and more of this as time goes on. There is zero onus on me. I just have to watch it happen. The onus is on you to catch up with and understand why companies are doing it. Most people who don't like social change are going to write it off…

Blacklist to denylist is a very recent thing. Believe me, I've been watching this happen over the past few weeks. There's been talk for a long time but these changes are recent, and clearly a response to American politics right now. I'm not denying positive motivations, I'm just skeptical of the actual impact, which is why we're having this discussion. I'm happy to be convinced, but these ideas aren't holding up to m…

> Blacklist to denylist is a very recent thing. Believe me, I've been watching this happen over the past few weeks.

It is not. That's exactly why I suggested you do a search and prove yourself wrong. Just as one of many examples, here is Google talking about it 2 years ago: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=842296

Which itself cites a source from 2014.

If you look hard enough you can find sources going all the way back to the 1970s talking about these exact words and why they are problematic. This is not new. It's just finally hitting the knee of the curve and loads of companies are doing this all at the same time.

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

#245

Post by g_b »

GuB-42 wrote: post #180
overgard wrote: post #11

I 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…

Branch names have no meaning on git. "master" is just the default name for the initial branch when you create a repository using "git create". Github just wants to change it to "main". It won't change existing repositories and you can rename it to anything you want afterwards, including "master".

Actually master is used as the default for submodules branch tracking [1]. I maintain a Git client application that deals with submodules & I have to take this use-case into account.

GitHub must work with Git & make this a proper change if they want to do this. Change the submodules specification as well.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules...

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

#246

Post by Rochus »

Rochus wrote: post #240
dang wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You posted the quote as a top-level comment with no other information ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518702 ). That was obviously ideological flamebait, and really a form of name-calling, so it was rightly flagged. Also, it's a red herring to bring up the fact that your top-level comment was flagged, when you degenerated into outrageous violations of the guidelines later in the thread. You can't do that, an…

As you can see, I am here under my real identity. I would not intentionally do what you are accusing me of here; and even having read your guidelines for several times now, and although I have also studied law and am used to reading and understanding regulations, I would not have come to the conclusion that my actions violate them; it's certainly not "obvious". At least now I understand how you interpret your guideli…

Just for the record: a quick google search reveals that a couple of fellows did exactly the same as I did (e.g. 21094157, 23526791, 19959548). And nothing happened, no flagging, no admin intervention. I wonder how I came to the dubious honour of this special treatment. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

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

#247

Post by [deleted] »

Rochus wrote: post #246
Rochus wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see, I am here under my real identity. I would not intentionally do what you are accusing me of here; and even having read your guidelines for several times now, and although I have also studied law and am used to reading and understanding regulations, I would not have come to the conclusion that my actions violate them; it's certainly not "obvious". At least now I understand how you interpret your guideli…

Just for the record: a quick google search reveals that a couple of fellows did exactly the same as I did (e.g. 21094157, 23526791, 19959548). And nothing happened, no flagging, no admin intervention. I wonder how I came to the dubious honour of this special treatment. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

[deleted]

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

#248

Post by weeboid »

finnthehuman wrote: post #169
weeboid wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even incremental progress is progress. And sometimes, incremental progress can happen at such an obtuse angle that it becomes completely unmergeable back to `main`. But you can always point to the spirit of the branch.

>Even incremental progress is progress. Is this progress, or the appearance of progress (aka masturbation)? This is Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that continuously lobbies the government on issues much less important to society than systemic inequality. They've decided the proper corporate action in the wake of new civil unrest over racism is to change a variable name in an esoteric professional tool. A tool u…

The appearance of progress is still progress. To take your analogy, masturbation isn't sex but you still bust a nut, yes?

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

#249

Post by __s »

exabrial wrote: post #59

We could have a bunch of reform: from reducing the police force size and budget, to removing pointless offenses ("no victim no crime"), to reduce interaction with police, to eliminating all government programs so to eliminate financial dependency on the government (create a toehold for systemic racism)... Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nati…

This isn't all Microsoft is doing

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/face-scans-police-microso... https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ceo-pledges-to-fight-rac... & here's a post from March: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/03/microso...

Weeding out this sort of terminology was already happening before recent events

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft

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