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Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

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Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#71

Post by da_big_ghey »

GhostVII wrote: post #53
PretzelFisch wrote: post #13

If the name change builds a larger, diverse, empathetic community. What have you or I lost?

We haven't lost anything, but we've gained the expectation that we should be accommodating a tiny minority of people being offended for no reason. Sure it's not much work to switch "master" to "main" (although in aggregate it's probably a tonne of person hours), but what happens when the next trend is to be offended at "blacklist", or "sanity check", or any of the other thousands of words that someone is inevitably g…

> blacklist

> sanity check

Sorry to tell you, but the PC twinkies are going after those, too:

https://insights.dice.com/2020/07/17/whitelist-blacklist-the...

https://gist.github.com/seanmhanson/fe370c2d8bd2b3228680e388...

There are significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity, to switching up so much terminology.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#73

Post by bluntfang »

zaksoup wrote: post #14
tachyonbeam wrote: post #3

If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive? I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were…

I don’t really get this sentiment. Are you so absolutely dedicated to the phrase “falling on deaf ears” that if somebody says to you “hey, that phrase might hurt somebody’s feelings, can you use an alternative” you take it as some sort of massive imposition on your life? I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection. I’m hearing im…

I'm sorry on behalf of the hacker news community for people downvoting your personal experience and making shallow digs at you via bad metaphors. It's clear the community moderators are more interested in appeasing the masses' bullying and shaming than trying to get a handle on ableism and white supremacy that is a scourge found in the core of american culture.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#74

Post by matthewmacleod »

zaksoup wrote: post #14
tachyonbeam wrote: post #3

If I say "you are the master of your own destiny", is that offensive, because the word "master" is always offensive? I think that "main branch" sounds fine, it makes as much sense as "master branch", but I'm irked that people are always caving to word policing. Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended? The other day, people at my workplace were…

I don’t really get this sentiment. Are you so absolutely dedicated to the phrase “falling on deaf ears” that if somebody says to you “hey, that phrase might hurt somebody’s feelings, can you use an alternative” you take it as some sort of massive imposition on your life? I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection. I’m hearing im…

I don’t understand why small changes that can be done in kindness are seen as so inconvenient as to be worth this level of rejection.

I don’t get this either; I’d guess it’s just a personal overreaction. When asked to change something like the language they use to describe something, some people interpret that as an attack. They tend to then overcompensate with a bit of “but I’m not a racist and anyway this is so insignificant it doesn’t even matter” bluster which seems like it probably takes more effort than just doing the thing that’s so insignificant to them anyway.

Life for me felt a bit brighter after I started reflecting more on the language I used, and realised that using an idiom like “falling on deaf ears” or “he’s a bit mental”, or even in some cases technical terminology like “master and slave” might carry different shading with different people that I wasn’t immediately aware of. The people you interact with are all going through their own shit all the time, and it’s nice to be mindful about things you say having an impact on them that you’d rather avoid.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#75

Post by mason55 »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #59
mason55 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if instead of master/slave the terms were master and "n-word". Would there be a reasonable argument to change it at that point? If you say "yes" then you agree there is a line somewhere. If that's the case then we should discuss where the line should be and why it should be there instead of saying "stop [worrying] about being politically correct". If you say "no" then your argument is that no words are too of…

Master/slave has a technical meaning beyond the sense of one person enslaving another. "Nigger" has no use case outside of making horrible and offensive remarks, aside from historical writing (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird) or making a point about racism, cases in which it is accepted.

So, two things (and I realize you aren't the person I originally replied to).

1. Your argument here is implicitly agreeing with my point number one. There are terms that would be considered too offensive and so the conversation is about where the line falls. We can't just say "let's not ever talk about whether a term is offensive" because there are some that we really wouldn't want to use, and so we should be talking about what terms are too offensive and why.

2. This is the conversation what what's too offensive and why. "Master/slave" only has technical meaning because we've been using it that way for awhile. But master/slave was originally picked because of its meaning in the historical context of slavery. The terminology itself has no inherent technical meaning. So, to me at least, that is not a great argument for why we shouldn't change it now. But at least this part of the discussion is two people talking about the same premise and not arguing past each other.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#76

Post by dspillett »

s_dev wrote: post #2

Given the motivation for this change -- will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration? Seems a touch over-sensitive in my book. 'main' is a better choice because it's shorter -- it's also a keyword in many C based programming languages that programmers are inherently slow to write/override. They should have been the stated reasons.

> will the same people be advocating that we must refer to main in HDDs that are in a RAID configuration?

Are drives commonly referred to as master/slave in that context? With the exception of when hot spares are present the drives in each array are considered equal (unless perhaps you have some arrangement where all parity information is on a subset of the drives). Maybe during the initial build process if you are converting a single drive to an array (for instance by adding a mirror to convert to RAID1) you might call the original drive the master, but this is in the context of a master tape rather than a master/slave allusion and even then I think I would have naturally called it the "source" drive instead.

The last time I remember referring to a drive as "master" was back when pre-SATA drive interfaces where dominant and you had up to two drives per interface cable.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#77

Post by giancarlostoro »

tdons wrote: post #42
umvi wrote: post #9

Sigh... sad to see the tech community bullied into compliance over a non-issue by political correctness activists. It's not really that big of a deal (and in some ways "main" is better anyway because it's 2 characters shorter), it's just the principle of the thing that bothers me. I would rather see projects and people stand their ground instead of caving to pressure anytime a twitter mob comes along.

The intransigent minority [1] strikes again. Perhaps the tech community should grow a spine and stand up to the minority that demands these sort of changes. That is: if the tech community /really/ doesn't want them, which (to me) is unclear. [1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

As an actual American minority I'm a little upset that instead of someone trying to do something meaningful about racism they bikeshedded this solution. Git was made by a man from Finland, I find it highly unlikely he had nefarious intentions in naming the default branch 'master' and anybody who disagrees really needs to reevaluate everything we know about Linus. He doesn't care about people's attributes, he cares about code quality above all things, not to mention in the context of the project the word master can only fit under the simple context of a golden master. Context matters.

Will I lose any sleep over it? Probably not, because this changes absolutely nothing in the racism landscape. It just confuses some, maybe outrages others. They've made something that was never racist into something racist (at least in their heads).

Sidenote: I do wonder if the person who proposed the change wrote it up from their master bedroom.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#78

Post by gorgoiler »

In my professional experience as a teacher of high school children the following terms consistently cause problems in class:

- git: literally a pejorative

- any website name ending in -hub, cf websites of interest to teenage boys

Imagine a software project called catshit made popular by a related website called catshitpiss where their great pearl-clutching debate is about how it potentially alienates people with cat fur allergies.

Re: Update to Git changes the default of init.defaultBranch to main

#79

Post by TooRightKite »

A lot of kids need to get out and earn some scrapes on their knees.

We are doomed if the next generation is truly this embarrassingly soft (though fortunately I am of the opinion that this is coming from a minority who didn't have any older siblings to put them in their place growing up).

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