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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

#171

Post by umvi »

tw4l wrote: post #153
umvi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inclusiv…

> 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). One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of th…

> I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.

IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt.

If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back.

The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.

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

#172

Post by csense »

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…

> Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others?

I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended.

If someone wants to be offended, they will find something that offends them.

Nothing you do will ever make such people stop being offended.

Next they'll be insisting that "bit" and "binary" need to be changed, because those words trigger people of non-binary gender, or something.

All of this is just making extra work. Repos and scripts have to be updated with the new branch name. The default behavior of Git is changing in a way that's not completely backward compatible, which means things that rely on it might break.

There's a definite cost to changing technical language, especially in the context of names in computer software that are part of the software's interface and might be relied on by other software that interfaces with it.

Changing perfectly passable names unnecessarily is just creating work for no purpose.

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

#174

Post by sheepz »

aaomidi wrote: post #134
tachyonbeam wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself am a minority as well. I'm genuinely worried that all of this talk and social shaming related to "systemic racism" is actually going to create more of the monster it purports to try to defeat. I mean, seriously. How do you think right wing people feel when they see left wing people on TV chanting that we should abolish the police? They clutch their guns even harder, that's what happens. By making an immense…

I mean, I'm also for abolishment of police. Police in basically everywhere of the world was made by the ruling class to keep people in order. This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves. This is the history of policing in the US. I think what it generally comes down to is a LOT of Americans…

I've come to the conclusion that such inept statements can only come from people who have lived their lives in very safe environments where they have never needed police protection. Such environments do not represent the safety of the country or the world in general.

It strikes me as odd that someone as familiar with history as yourself would single out the US and the practice of slavery whereas slavery has existed almost everywhere in the world, including here in Europe. Yet nobody in Europe thinks that the formerly enslaved peasants' much temporally disconnected descendants are substantially worse off because of that or that this would somehow translate into today's policing.

In conclusion, abolishing the police is a completely stupid idea that the American people in general do not even support [1] that hurts not the tech elites of Silicon valley, but normal people living in high-crime areas.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dcBdhE...

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

#175

Post by umvi »

zacwest wrote: post #12

The branch name "master" does not have "golden master" or "master copy" roots: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

That seems like a try-hard. Unless Linus intended "master" to mean "owner", drawing parallels to other VCS is purely speculative. If Linus really intended "master" in git to mean "owner"... where are the "slaves"?

Or are you saying Linus made the default branch "master" because of systemic racism ingrained into him from previous VCS?

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

#176

Post by tw4l »

umvi wrote: post #171
tw4l wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of th…

> I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome. IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to s…

I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. I think where we disagree is in characterizing making inclusive language changes as "political" and keeping the status quo as "non-political", when the status quo is demonstrably not working for a lot of people. Changing "master" to "main" is admittedly likely near the end of the list of what the tech industry needs to do to in that regard, but if we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.

The idea of places like HN being meritocratic tech utopias where race and gender are irrelevant and everyone's just a username with some neat ideas is really compelling. I can only offer that in my experience it's common knowledge among woman developers that if you want to have a good day, it's best not to read the comments here. It seems I've forgotten that myself!

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

#177

Post by vlovich123 »

stnmtn wrote: post #164
throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only this, but the idea that we should focus our efforts on these utter non-problems (no one has ever been harmed or disenfranchised in any way by the use of this term) as opposed to any of the very real problems our society faces (environment, growing inequality, etc) is itself a real problem. And the people who are meant to be the "victims" of these issues almost never take offense or issue (e.g., Japanese opin…

To me this point never makes much sense, do you really believe that a change as small as a naming convention switch means that we can't focus on real problems? It doesn't make sense and is a non-sequitur argument

At a minimum you should be considering organizational change fatigue. It takes expenditure of political capital to enact these changes even if you don’t see it right away. Spending it on this does mean you’re less able to spend it on others. So asking “is this the most important thing to spend that capital on?” doesn’t seem like a bad question. Additionally, if someone perceives you as being wasteful in how you choose to spend that capital they may be even more resistant in the future to changes that are far less cosmetic.

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

#178

Post by GauntletWizard »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #104
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, let's apply the process. Suppose Person A says something, and Person B thinks another colleague, Person C, might find offensive. That alone may be enough to offend Person B. They feel Person A may be creating an uncomfortable environment, intentional or not. Person C may not even be actually offended, but other people of Person C's {race,sex,etc} have been offended by similar statements. How people apply judgment…

The problem (IMO) is a growing distrust of Person B, because that guy keeps policing everything and everyone such that he appears to be using Person C's {race,sex,etc} to prop up and brandish his own moral authority in a way that Person C finds to be annoying and perhaps even actually offensive . Person B doesn't even care about the real issues affecting Person C or even the collective as a whole, and every time thes…

I’ve seen a lot of the following: Person B is mildly competent, but keeps having their bad ideas shot down. Person D is not, but uses their diverse identity as a crutch. Person C ends up a bystander, blamed for the bad deeds of Person D because B+D have formed an unholy alliance with B providing the technical cover and D providing the outrage, making the bad technical decision about identity instead, despite them not speaking for all of identity. Between the two of them, the are able to wield power for mediocre ideas, and mediocre ideas are often much worse than bad ones. Bad ideas get thrown out or die. Mediocre ones gum up the works for ages to come.

Master vs Main is not a big deal. Changing the default without any technical advantage is a pain in the ass. Had they bundled it with Git V3 when moving to sha256 and everyone having to rebuild their repositories anyway (another mediocre technical idea), it would be palatable.

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

#180

Post by agustif »

wayneftw wrote: post #98
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…

> ...the biggest deep learning conference has been renamed, after something like 20 years, because of this kind of pressure. This was interesting: > Of the survey respondents, 1,881 were men and 294 were women. Of the women, 44% agreed a name change should occur and 40% disagreed. Of the men, 28% agreed a name change should occur and 55% disagreed.[5] More than half of those surveyed were against the change, but 30%…

As a non native-english speaker.

Was this about nipples? LOL is that an acronym for something else I don't know about?

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