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New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

zdnet.com

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Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#101

Post by tzs »

susam wrote: post #11

Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for the main branch. The term "master" for a branch name always felt a little strange to me. One might ask, "What is master?" The answer usually is, "It is the main branch." The same thing held true for "trunk" in the SVN world, although it made more sense. One might ask, "What is trunk?" It requires a lengthy explanation, "It is the main develop…

> Political correctness aside, "main" does sound like a more natural name for the main branch

Sure, but who says that what is now called "master" is the main branch?

In my repos, I consider the main branch to be the branch I spend most of my time working on. For simple things that is "master", but for more complex things I'm mostly on some other branch.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#102

Post by Yetanfou »

spikeseltzer wrote: post #27
627467 wrote: post #14

Performative activism. Master example of avoiding dealing with real issues.

What’s an example of a real issue, if changing terminology to make underrepresented engineers feel less uncomfortable isn’t one?

I have yet to hear from an under-represented engineer who felt uncomfortable from the use of the term master in git and github. I have heard a number of activists claim this to be the case but judging by the reactions from those who supposedly were to feel uncomfortable - some of them right here in this thread - this was a non-problem and the change is purely theatrical.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#103

Post by throw_m239339 »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #74

Honest question: anyone here on HN from a black US background? How do you feel about all this"political revisionism" of the tech jargon? I find it silly to the point that it's offensive, but I'm not black and I don't live in the US.

I'm black, although not American. I don't wake up every morning thinking about "how deeply racist the word 'master' is". I'm not stupid, I understand that words can have different meaning depending on the context. All these things have absolutely nothing to do with me or my race, it's just a tiny clique of people who get off asserting power on others, nothing more.

Unfortunately, IT and open source orgs do pander to these people, something they will ultimately regret because these people pushing identity politics everywhere are not reasonable and they will always find something to get outraged at, at the expense of the org itself.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#104

Post by WalterSear »

brnt wrote: post #56
robjan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "bachelor" in the context of education came from the Latin "baccalaureate", a word which we still use today. Master comes from "magister" which means teacher.

The precise definition of baccalaureate is however very variable. In much of Europe it refers to what Americans would call the last years of highschool.

Doesn't change the source of the word.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#105

Post by 627467 »

spikeseltzer wrote: post #27
627467 wrote: post #14

Performative activism. Master example of avoiding dealing with real issues.

What’s an example of a real issue, if changing terminology to make underrepresented engineers feel less uncomfortable isn’t one?

Are you implying that only non-underrepresented engineers are capable of uncomfortable speech?

I'm sure any terminology can make some engineer (underrepresented or not) uncomfortable. Therapy may help if it becomes recurrent and hard to manage.

I'm pretty sure most engineers, underrepresented or not, would appreciate a healthy, dignifying and diverse management structure and workplace so that uncomfortable language not only is less likely to naturally happen, but when it does happen everyone (underrepresented or not) is adult enough to know if a line was crossed.

I'm pretty sure that underrepresented groups would prioritize stopped being randomly killed, be evicted, be massively encarcerated, be without healthcare and be in a constant dog-eat-dog environment.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#106

Post by amazingman »

emerged wrote: post #24

You can continue to pretend otherwise, but this is an ideological infiltration into a supposedly rational field. Downvotes or not I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

You may be superficially correct, I’m not sure, but honestly the name of the canonical git branch is not a hill worth dying on.

IMO the right move to battle the more draconian, Orwellian language policing of the cancel culture / “antiracism” dogma is to conserve your energy for the fights worth fighting. This just isn’t one of them.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#107

Post by bhaak »

underyx wrote: post #66
bhaak wrote: post #52

I don‘t mind renaming the default branch. But I’ll see many tools breaking or bugs surfacing because they can’t find the master branch. One repository I used didn’t have a “master” branch but a “Master” branch. That was annoying. Git doesn’t have a concept of a main branch. Maybe we will get that now as a result of GitHub’s change.

The has never been a guarantee that the main branch is called "master". No tool should've been depending on the name of the main branch.

You are technically correct.

In reality though you can't expect programmers to code for eventualities that occur only in extremely rare cases (until now).

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#108

Post by bhaak »

_y5hn wrote: post #53
bhaak wrote: post #52

I don‘t mind renaming the default branch. But I’ll see many tools breaking or bugs surfacing because they can’t find the master branch. One repository I used didn’t have a “master” branch but a “Master” branch. That was annoying. Git doesn’t have a concept of a main branch. Maybe we will get that now as a result of GitHub’s change.

main seems like a better word overall, though not to be confused with main.go.

I would have preferred "default" as Mercurial does it.

"main" suggests it is the main branch under development whereas "default" doesn't as clearly.

But both terms are better than "master" if we disregard the weight a bad default name has gotten after years of continued use.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#109

Post by underyx »

bhaak wrote: post #107
underyx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The has never been a guarantee that the main branch is called "master". No tool should've been depending on the name of the main branch.

You are technically correct. In reality though you can't expect programmers to code for eventualities that occur only in extremely rare cases (until now).

It's less rare than you think. Lots of repos use "develop", or "trunk" as their default, for instance.

Re: New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

#110

Post by tehlike »

eesmith wrote: post #93
tehlike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.

Because you wrote "it's all very us centric too" - and I struggle to find out how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American interpretation of the words.

But github caters to a global market. That's why replacing master->main is just doing busy work that doesn't do anything to address the problem?
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