Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lore.kernel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 271 posts

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

#141

Post by tarboreus »

dingaling wrote: post #118
giancarlostoro wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Git is a couple of pegs down from asshole. Better analogy in American English would be "jerk," without, perhaps, the implied sexual connotation.

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

#142

Post by umvi »

wadkar wrote: post #52
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.

I am happy to see this. You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive. It may not be that big of a deal for you but it is a big deal for those who don’t share the same worldview as you. Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others? What do you think about people who curse like…

> but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive

In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.

It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).

And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).

I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init `. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

aaomidi wrote: post #125
da_big_ghey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that master/slave actually conveys a relationship between two things. It was picked for technical use because of that. Naming something "nigger", even in a technical would do what, offend some other piece of code? If somebody chose an offensive name arbitrarily (like, say, "git"), I would understand the impulse. Though the former is fraught with specific and awful connotations towards a very specific grou…

To me master and slave is soemthing that shouldn't convey a relationship. Slavery exists with the shitiness of our culture. That's not something that should be used to convey a relationship between things. Abuse shouldn't be part of our technical language.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by RhysU »

aaomidi wrote: post #124
revnode wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what are the downsides of git changing this? How is this going to impact your day to day work flow?

"Lemme go run main" is now ambiguous. The main entry point? Or the main branch?

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

#148

Post by kissiel »

As a Slav I feel offended by changes like this, mainly because it means that someone saw a word that - in a totally different context - and thought of the bad meaning. What next? s/killall/pleaseturnoff?

I also have a bad feeling about Parus major (the bird).

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

#149

Post by tdy_err »

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 thought the same but when I looked it up out of curiosity I was surprised to see the primary (probably most established) definition of master is ~ “one who owns people”.

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

#150

Post by lnenad »

dspillett wrote: post #84
GhostVII wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" That has already happened in some places, though blacklist/whitelist are still the most common naming convention for that sort of thing. Blocklist is actually a better name IMO, and I've seen it used in places, and an easy enough change. I don't have any examples I remember of what people might use instead of whitelist though, allowlist doesn't particularly trip of the tongue IMO. Grandfathering is anot…

> Blocklist

IMHO it's definitely not. What I do with my blacklist might have nothing to do with blocking anything.

Post reply on HN