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Locking comments. Had a good run, over half a day, but this was always headed for an emotional train wreck.
No one commits to
trunkanymore…
I think you are onto something. Especially Mastodon devs are losing so much.
The default branch for some projects is “production” since CD deploys on pushing to that branch
For new projects, main. My thought is that even if master is not offensive, since the industry has generally made the change, the only reason to stick with master is stubbornness or hating political correctness, neither of which aligns with my self-view so I’ll use main and move on.
In general if people are genuinely hurt by the use of some words, I’m not sadistic so I’ll avoid using them. From my perspective morality is the pursuit of the reduction of suffering, even if that suffering is internal.
It kills me that this take is so hard to find online.
Did I think calling the main branch “master” was offensive before this controversy? No, I’d never even considered it.
Does switching to calling it “main” impact me, like… at all? Also no. It’s like the lowest effort change to make.
If I can make my industry more welcoming to a more diverse group of people, that is a solid victory and way more important than the name of my primary git branch.
I mean, the problem people have with it isn’t a name change or improving inclusivity. It’s the fact that they feel like they are being bullied into doing something they had no input into in the name of inclusivity. What pisses people off is how, as soon as someone says “x” isn’t maximally inclusive of some marginalized group, everyone has to change or else get called a categorically bad person.
For example, suppose you have a red hat that you enjoy wearing. You got it at wafflefest a decade ago, and it says “I <3 Waffles”. Then one day, your boss sends out an email that no more red hats are allowed in the office because it might create an unwelcoming environment. You will, of course, be pissed off. Not because you can’t wear your waffle hat anymore, but because your boss feels entitled to control the minutiae of you life like this. You’ll think to yourself “fuck that guy, and fuck whoever brought up banning red hats in some corporate board room 1000 miles away. This is bullshit!”
People like their autonomy, and don’t like being controlled. Doesn’t matter if it is in the name of increased corporate profits, or inclusivity, or saving the bees, or dying of lung cancer. They don’t care about the name of their git branch - they care that they feel like they are being forced to change it.
That analogy doesn’t really apply though. The decision to change master to main was a collective one, not made by “some corporate board room 1000 miles away”. It may feel like that’s how it went down because you only noticed when GitHub changed their defaults or whatever, but that decision was not made in a vacuum, it was the result of lots of people saying “hey, this is a problem, let’s fix it” for a long time before any actions were taken.
No one is offended by that word, at some point we need to stop wasting time on pointless debates and move on. If I start tweeting that I find “main” offensive are we going to have to find another name?
Don’t forget laziness. I have some projects that have been around forever and I am not changing it across my infra because I am lazy. I will do it next year…
Do you have any evidence that “the industry” has made the change? My personal experience says the opposite. Unless you mean “new repositories use the new default name” which says more about people simply not caring rather than anything else.
In general if people are genuinely hurt by the use of some words, I’m not sadistic so I’ll avoid using them
That’s a sane position. Only issue is that this have nothing to do with the question, and the people that were the most vocal about this issue had no business talking about it in the first place.
Ultimately, git is flexible; beyond some potential local and shared automation, anyone can call their local branches however they want, regardless of other and servers. Personally, changing years of habits and tooling (that probably should not have hardcoded some names in the first place) is not worth following a change proposed by misled people.
I always rename my branch to main. Because it’s shorter? That’s the extent of my reasoning. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Master. I find the whole “reasoning” behind the controversy absolute horseshit peddled by nontechnical people on the sidelines
Just that master doesn’t actually makes much sense in most git workflows.
If you understand master like you would understand the master/slave relationship in old tech, then of course, master seems to make sense until you realize that there is no slave in that sense or in name. Additional, master is rarely doing anything but having release or hot fixes being merged into it. Arguably dev is the master of the branches.
In other words, master was always a bad name. It is silly to rename it because “racism” but it is at least equally silly to act like master is a much better name than “main” or “live” or “prod” or … Fuck, the list is long.
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Based. We need to make music industry use Main records and not Master records from now on!
“Trunk records” for indie music seems 110% appropriate to me.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/master
contrastive adjective (“he who is greater”)
This is not to say that the term predates slavery and is neutral today in pejorative terms.
Music used it because the original is of greater quality. The term is technically and syntactically correct here.
Slavery used the term correctly, extensively and horribly. Honestly, it tainted it.
Most of the people who say it’s no big deal or they don’t care have ancestors who were on the unimpacted or positively impacted side of slavery. Very “let them eat cake” tones. (even though that story itself is a misnomer)
To be perfectly honest, the term in its etymological roots doesn’t fit well in the digital age for common use cases. It’s fallen into common parlance from the analog era, when it had a more direct meaning. Even though it’s not regularly being used as a pejorative, there’s (not zero, but) little harm in slowly phasing it out for better, more accurate terms like main or trunk or origin.
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I’m not going to be bullied by liberal arts partisans into reconfiguring how my brain works
I hate to tell you this, but that’s a fascist argument using tradition to block out change and accepting others. It’s a screw those other races/religions history and feelings because it makes me feel less powerful kind of statement. I doubt that’s your intent, but there it is.
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the master/slave relationship in old tech
The master branch is called master not because of slavery. It’s a master copy of the code
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You know that master has multiple meanings?
Master of a slave is one of them.
Master is also the title you get when you master sth.
So the thing is that master was probably a thing before slaves were invented (I guess).
before slaves were invented
Like, before the invention of agriculture?
Master debater
Ding ding ding. Trend-hopping C-suites pretending to give a fuck because DEI or whatever.
both. but majority are master cause that’s the default and I’m too lazy to change nor do I really care.
I use master in all my projects
I save my code as .txt files on my hard drive.
They follow the naming convention “project1”, “project1a”, “project1a1” and so on in consecutive logical order
I believe that’s called goblin mode (production_code.final(2).txt)
The real answer is whichever is easiest. If you’ve got a master branch and it’s a pain to switch, then I wouldn’t do it. If you’ve got a badass coder who is disturbed by the terminology, then I’d say to do it to keep the peace. It depends on the situation.
Using master is stupid. Is your branch in charge of others? Is it more skilled than your other branches? Software engineering has too many crusty dorks that stick to their paradigms like it’s their religion. Acting like it’s their heritage to use outdated terms but also it doesn’t matter so that’s why they’ll keep using it.
Calling an original, analogue recording a master does make sense, as all copies of it will by nature be of a lesser quality. This isn’t the case for git branches tho.
I don’t think the word “master” is indicating quality though, just that it’s the “source” or “basis”
The name have nothing to do with being in charge of others, skill level, or anything, but, sure.
Personally I’ve come to hate main because it breaks habits easily. I’m working 75% of the time on master repos, but then I might need to do a quick edit on a main repo and suddenly my git checkout master doesn’t work.
Or even copy pasting scripts from one project to another can easily break if you forget to change the branch
The reason behind the change is pretty stupid anyway (I’m against slavery but it shouldn’t be treated like a slur still)
I honestly don’t know, and I’m not at my PC to check. I assume it’s main, but with my ADHD I’ve never actually paid attention to that. All I ever remember are my branch names.
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For all the sudden word scholars here: there is no second word “master” that’s spelled, pronounced, and written exactly the same as the other one but is entirely unrelated to the concept of master\slave. All modern meanings of the word master derive from the same root: magister, meaning an authority or teacher.
A “master recording” is the authority, the base copy from which all others are duplicated. They aren’t called “slave” copies, although the primary use of the terms in computing did originally use those 2 words. Also as someone else pointed out, you don’t even really make copies of git branches in the same way as audio so the term is misapplied.
Main is also a bad name, unless you’re working on a solo project with only 1 main branch and some features. As soon as you start collaborating with other people, you should really have individual dev branches or “forks” (be honest, 90% of you aren’t rawdogging git straight from the CLI, there’s a forge website involved as hub) to work on, with an integration\testing “fork”\branch to combine work and a release branch for final code, with each discrete release tagged.
No gods, no kings, no masters!
personally I use emojis for branch names. it makes things way clearer.
🤡 is the master branch 🛩️🏢 is dev
Is use
developanyways. becausemain/masteris for deployments only. When it comes to starting a new project, I don’t give a flying horseshit of a fuck. I use whatever git sets me up with and due to terminal auto complete it’smaTAB either way. The way I experienced it, everyone with a strong preference towards either is an annoying shithat of a person who will be booted from my team the moment they start this debate.mainin the streets,masterin the sheets
