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On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

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Re: On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

#51

Post by beej71 »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #38
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #26

I prefer "main" as it's 2 chars shorter, and more accurately descriptive. The years-long transition where both namings are in use, will however be worse than either alone. This is always the way: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EI4EJwqX0AAvnxD.png

>and more accurately descriptive. Not really. "master" clearly meant "master copy" - the copy with everything in it. What does "main" mean? There is no "main". Git is distributed.

The only way master was special was that it was the first branch, created automatically on the first commit. Everything after that is convention.

Re: On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

#53

Post by bavell »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #50
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and more accurately descriptive. Not really. "master" clearly meant "master copy" - the copy with everything in it. What does "main" mean? There is no "main". Git is distributed.

> Git is distributed It's distributed into https://github.com i.e. not in any real sense at all.

I didn't realize GitHub.com was hardcoded into git and they couldn't be separated.

In all seriousness, just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. At it's core git is decentralized which is how GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate.

Re: On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

#55

Post by rcarmo »

captainmuon wrote: post #8

There is a term for well intended, but useless attempts at inclusiveness: "buttering the cat". I think this is a prime case. Do we have to change "master's thesis" or "golden master" or "scrum master", too? No, because that is a different word! Now what I really did find off-putting is the use of master in "master and slave", as in IDE drives or in I2C. When I first heard it I didn't really bother me personally, but…

I can’t speak for the cat, but this kind of change is really annoying. Then again I am not in the US and have no cultural biases that allow me to relate to the motivation behind this kind of thing.

But hypersensitivity to these matters seems to have taken the tech world by storm, and we live in a largely US-led ASCII/UTF-8 where strings of characters are sometimes imbued with magical meanings, so…

Re: On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”

#56

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

bavell wrote: post #53
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is distributed It's distributed into https://github.com i.e. not in any real sense at all.

I didn't realize GitHub.com was hardcoded into git and they couldn't be separated. In all seriousness, just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. At it's core git is decentralized which is how GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate.

> just because that's the way it's currently used doesn't mean it's the only way to do it

If lakes form, then it means that water falls downhill. No, "GitHub.com" is not hardcoded, it's the largest of the lakes that we happened to end up with. We could have had different lakes, and might somehow in future. But it shows that the gravitational pull of centralisation is in operation. The technical fact that "core git is decentralized" doesn't matter, centralised usage is the usage subset that prevails in practice, due to social forces.

"Github is not coded in" is not an argument that "decentralisation could have prevailed". Some form of centralisation apparently was inevitable. This is the one that we got.

> GitHub and gitlab and dozens of others can all exist independently of another and still interoperate.

Do they "interoperate"? Isn't it overwhelmingly more usual for a project to pick one of those and stay there. i.e. centralised usage.

Yes, they use the same protocol. it's decentralized like http.

"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." (1)

This indicates that centralising forces are happening here too.

1) https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

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