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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

#111

Post by jamienicol »

GhostVII wrote: post #69

I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expecta…

You are welcome to be as unaccomodating as you'd like in your own projects, but if the people doing the work in projects such as git want to make this change that is their choice. what you're really arguing is that they should be accomodating to your opinion and not others'.

"master" in a computer science context isn't named after master of ceremonies, but after the offensive master/slave meaning.

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

#112

Post by jtlowe »

blaklivesmatter wrote: post #49
defen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is Free software so nothing is stopping people from forking it and excluding these patches if they feel that strongly about it.

That is not the point. The point is millions of man months of time an money are being spent doing something that has zero meaning. Changing master/slave on networking, ok. Changing master copy to main copy doesn't remotely help black lives or black pride or anything whatsoever. If all the time and effort doing this was actually spent on useful things to help black lives it would be 10000x more effective. Instead all…

It is meaningful in ways that are not measured in development time. There is a genuine effort to be less offensive regardless of how big of an impact it currently makes, or how meaningless individuals may believe it to be.

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

#113

Post by denysvitali »

joh6nn wrote: post #46
cratermoon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> politics or any social matter IMHO should be kept out of software in general How would that work?

right? maybe Op would care to give examples of software issues that have no social or political ramifications?

Pure algorithms, for one. I don't think that Merge Sort for example has had or will ever have any political / social ramification.

On the contrary, I see that now the SJW trend is to attack IT in general and make a huge deal out of terms that (given the context) are perfectly fine.

I wonder how much it will take before we'll have to assign pronouns to the connetors or to the USB cables

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

#114

Post by tachyonbeam »

pseudalopex wrote: post #103
tachyonbeam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree that this specific change is insignificant, but the biggest deep learning conference has been renamed, after something like 20 years, because of this kind of pressure. Word policing has a bit of a 1984 feel to it. Some desire to control you and how you think by controlling which words you use, with new arbitrary words being banned all the time. Instead of actual change, we're focusing on the superficial…

Changing a default isn't banning a word. The conference was called NIPS. It's slang for nipples and a racial slur. It isn't like everyone was mature about it. There was an unofficial event called TITS. People wore shirts proclaiming "my NIPS are NP hard". Funny but hardly professional.

> Changing a default isn't banning a word.

Yes it is. This change is effectively reflecting a push, by bullies, to ban the word master, to eliminate it from spoken and written language, that's exactly what's happening.

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

#115

Post by GhostVII »

jamienicol wrote: post #111
GhostVII wrote: post #69

I hate this, we shouldn't be accommodating people being irrationally offended. Sure it's not much work in this instance, but what happens when people move on to being offended by blacklist, or sanity check, or one of the other thousands of terms that can be warped to be offensive. And then if you refuse to change because it makes no sense and is a lot of work, you become some kind of racist/sexist because the expecta…

You are welcome to be as unaccomodating as you'd like in your own projects, but if the people doing the work in projects such as git want to make this change that is their choice. what you're really arguing is that they should be accomodating to your opinion and not others'. "master" in a computer science context isn't named after master of ceremonies, but after the offensive master/slave meaning.

It's their choice, but I still don't like the precedent it sets. I don't really care what they call it, I just don't want this kind of thing to become an expectation, resulting in me either having to do a bunch of renaming work or risk being seen as some kind of ist.

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

#116

Post by bluntfang »

revnode wrote: post #86
bluntfang wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like complaining about a disagreement in direction of an open source project while not wanting to put effort in directing it in the way you like via the normal channels, forking or contribution, to be immature.

I feel like demanding contribution as a response to criticism of open source software is immature. Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.

>Just because you decided to let everyone see and use your code, doesn't mean someone can't say something negative about it. That is not some sort of privilege reserved for contributors.

Of course not. It's just extremely immature when there are direct ways via work and effort (forking or contributing) to gain social capital in the community to influence change and direction.

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

#117

Post by tachyonbeam »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #74
zaksoup wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ins…

> I don’t get this either; I’d guess it’s just a personal overreaction.

Maybe some of us frogs can tell the water is slowly getting close to boiling. Maybe we just don't like being bullied and told what to say and think.

> master and slave

Master as in record, not as in "master and slave". There haven't been "master and slave" IDE hard drives for about 15 years now. FWIW, I would give someone a funny look if they purposely used the word "slave" in their codebase or as part of technical jargon, but the word master isn't automatically about slave ownership. That's just incorrect.

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

#118

Post by dingaling »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #77
tdons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

> Git was made by a man from Finland

... and deliberately named it using a word that's offensive in British English.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git

If you said 'git' to someone in an English pub you'd be looking for a punch.

For USians it's roughly comparable to 'asshole' on the spectrum of offensiveness.

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

#119

Post by pseudalopex »

IshKebab wrote: post #91
PretzelFisch wrote: post #13

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

I now have to go to extra effort to get my default branch to be called `master`. Plus I can no longer assume that the default branch is `master`. I have to check for every project whether they are using `main` or `master`. Maybe not a lot more effort, but it definitely is more effort, and for basically no gain. Let's not kid ourselves that black people being targeted by the police care about Git branch names. Hell ap…

You couldn't assume that before.

Some black people don't care about this kind of thing. Some do.

Git is a generic insult and doesn't have historical baggage. Nobody identifies as a git or the descendant of gits.

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

#120

Post by kemayo »

s_dev wrote: post #108
kemayo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In RAID, unlike in git, the word "slave" is also used in conjunction with "master". That seems to inherently raise some negative associations... and it's not like "primary / secondary" aren't easily available substitutes.

You've haven't solved the problem though -- just kicked the can down the road -- somebody could come along explain that their offended by the terms "primary" and "secondary" as it implies one is above the other when they prefer to see equality and no offence caused. When that happens you'll find yourself in the same position as us now who are saying the term "master" when discussing source control or HDD configuratio…

Sure, but I don't think the prevailing argument here is that any offense no matter how small should be catered to.

To produce a silly hypothetical, how about if anti-vaxxers got really upset about the phrase "code injection"? Even though anti-vaxxers are a worryingly large subgroup who've managed to return us to the days when measles is a thing to worry about, I still think that general cultural perception is such that everyone would roll their eyes at this complaint.

Rather, for "master" and "slave" and "blacklist" and whatnot, it's that enough of a groundswell of awareness occurred in general society that a lot of people started to feel awkward about the use of a term. It's akin to how "negro" used to be a perfectly acceptable descriptive word, but if you used it in casual conversation now you'd get a negative reaction even though it's not the bad "n-word".

We can't separate the current drive to replace slavery-related terms from the last few years of events in America. There's been a lot of events which have driven home to people that, yes, Black people in America are still having a rough time -- and in America, that inexorably ties to the historical reality of slavery.

A lot of these replacements are symbolic, driven more by a desire to say "hey, we accept you! you are welcome in our community" than any severe offense at any particular term. But symbolic things matter in aggregate.

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