Honest to God not something I care about but: this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for “master”. I do know some people _did_ care about the name. Sometimes surprisingly senior people who never supported a tech upgrade want the name changed. In any event, it’s done, “main” won, it’s fine, let’s move on.
Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.
I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo.
Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.
I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part.
As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception.
As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions:
1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech.
2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage.
Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to.
At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
PSA: You can run one git command and ignore this change and associated drama entirely. I don't care which you prefer, but let's not pretend like main "won" when sticking with master is as easy as:
Has the Linux community thought through the implications of using words like "containerization", when millions of slaves are still shipped around in shipping containers [1]? Docker is problematic technology to say the least.
The whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness.
Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.
There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.
... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.
In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
It is based on nothing. It is not intended to be offensive, and it is not intended to be about slavery. Similarly how master and slave pins are not either, or how blacklist and whitelist are not about race either!
Of course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it.
I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
Is it silly though? With enough linguistic archeology I bet you can make this entire comment I'm writing right now extremely problematic and offensive. The linguistic treadmill means exactly that older terms change meaning back in time. They also change meaning FORWARD in time, meaning your inoffensive terms today will almost certainly be offensive in the future.
It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English.
If there was a case where that was more than a quantum of annoyance, where it actually was any kind of actual weight at all, maybe those incredibly small feelings might be interesting to weigh. But they're not. They're the smallest of feelings, weighing nothing. Making this change is the easiest lightest most obviously acceptable of wins.
I think those people are taken into account, and on balance are ignored because their argument is far less reasonable. "Slavery was one of the most awful things humans have ever done so we shouldn't continue to use the language of slavery to describe every day things because that diminishes the importance of our history" makes a lot more sense than "we should keep this terminology because it's tradition."
"Was"? There are millions of people in slavery in the US penal system today. Entire cities like Dubai continue to be built by slaves. I, for one, find it to be extremely insulting towards their intelligence to think that unrelated use of the word "master" in a different context is somehow considered to be offensive.
But as I said elsewhere, I do not care about that a lot. However, I do think those words are bad for other reasons because they do not illustrate the _actual_ role and relationships of branches in a VCS in a _good way_. If the master branch is not actually ruling over other branches, then it should be named something else, like "primary" as far as I am concerned.
> Except the master branch has nothing to do with slavery.
It did, it originated from Bitkeeper that literally used to the term "slave" to refer to non-master branches.
> It's more like 'master bedroom.'
This is even more ridiculous. Where do you think that term came from? What made that a master bedroom in comparison to the other bedrooms? Could it be because that was the one the master was sleeping in, in comparison to the ones slaves were sleeping in?
The cost is measured primarily in time. Experts in git/GitHub just experience a little annoyance (per repo). But for new comers (esp self-learners) the cost is much higher (takes the form of dysfunctional instructions, tutorials, readmes), and at the margin could cause someone to give up on a tutorial.
Cost should be weighed up against benefits i.e. that those hurt or upset by use of the word 'master' would no longer be. It's highly questionable whether the term master ever upset anyone (not simply those who were upset by the idea that someone else could be upset by the term's use).
A second-order cost is the precedent. There isn't a word in the English language which cannot be interpreted as malevolent given enough effort from the interpreter. Therefore it can be a better strategy to accept that there exist words with multiple meanings depending on context, and live with this language feature/imperfection, rather than impose costly changes on everyone to benefit a (possibly non-existent) few.
Implying perfectly reasonable inquiry (namely, if 'master' is to be removed, why aren't other 'problematic' terms?) is a "jerk" for asking seems off to me.
This is a nitpick, dismissing others' questions and directing them to let it go, is overreach. That's not for you to determine. It's fine as a suggestion (especially if accompanied with your perception of why they ought to), but as a directive it comes across as though you assume you know what's better for someone else without evidence to support the assumption, or without it occurring to you that your assumption would be questioned.
I agree the case for changing words like man, kill, and abort is weak (so weak that you perceived it as a joke), but the case for changing those words isn’t significantly weaker than was the case for changing master, and master was indeed changed. OP is right to question why the weak arguments in favour of changing master won, and if this shall continue unchecked.
Correction: it costs something (breaking with past convention which adds friction), and it makes some people unhappy and others unhappy. This is not a harmless, all-upside change the way you are making it out to be.
Because it goes hand-in-hand with the euphemism treadmill. I defer to the late great George Carlin's words on the subject:
I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.
> This change does hurt people. Have you never seen a newbie struggle with an out of date tutorial? There’s fifteen years of books, tutorials, videos, and other learning material out there that assumes the use of `master`. It takes about a decade for these things to die off in the clear-cut cases. However this is not even a clear-cut case, because Git defaults to `master` and GitHub defaults to `main`, so the confusion will last longer.
> Version control is a hard enough concept to grasp well at the best of times. And now there’s going to be a bunch of newbies – many of whom will be black – getting frustrated and confused because they are following the tutorials as best as they can and not getting the results they expect. On balance, there is probably more harm done to black developers with this change than leaving things as they were. Haven’t you ever seen a young developer lose confidence when they are trying the best they can to follow instructions and it’s just not working? Disliking the fact that this is being done to new developers thoughtlessly is not “pointless”.
> There’s also the matter that everybody I have seen advocating for this change has been white, and the responses I have seen from black developers generally ranges from “this is pointless” to “this is [performative / virtue signalling]” (insert appropriate term depending upon whether they are left or right wing). People start with the assumption that this is clearly the right thing to do for black developers, but people assuming that don’t seem to be actually listening to black developers about this, or at the very least, only listen to the ones that agree with them.
> This could have been done in a better way – coördinate with the main Git project around changing the default across the board, plan an update to as much documentation as possible, and make it happen in sync. But GitHub charged in unilaterally, seemingly with an overactive case of a white saviour complex, with people like you telling everybody ”this change hurts nobody”. This was done in an entirely thoughtless manner and does hurt people.
Beyond what I originally wrote, you also had ridiculousness like `git init` creating a branch called `main` if you install Git through Apple developer tools and `git init` creating a branch called `master` if you install Git through Homebrew; or getting a repo with `main` if you initialise the repo on GitHub and then clone it locally, but getting a repo with `master` if you initialise the repo locally then push to GitHub.
I don’t especially care what the default is, but I do care that GitHub didn’t seem to give a shit about the disruption they caused as long as they looked like they were performing racial justice of some kind (whilst having zero black people in leadership!). Why wasn’t the change centralised through the Git project so everybody could make the change together?
I’m disappointed that this headline will lead to more clicks. This is your reminder that in git the branch name is just a pointer to a commit. Renaming that pointer is relatively seamless on GitHub (https://github.com/github/renaming?tab=readme-ov-file#rename...). Also, git 3.0 isn’t forcing this change on existing repos, just new ones that no automation depends on. And if you really like the old name that’s always an option for your repos. Remember, it’s just a pointer.
The other git 3.0 changes are more consequential and worthy of discussion - changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security and performance, changing the storage format for performance and introducing Rust.
SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.
Huh. I always visualized "trunk" as some kind of chest where all the code was stored. Somehow it never occurred to me to think about trees. What a weird feeling.
Don't know why people here got triggered by DEI, but the "master" naming is just bad, "main" is actually a better and more generic description.
The word "master" means someone/thing that has the capability of controlling things, like "Mastered", "Master Degree" etc.
But in most Git contexts, "master" is just "one of the breach that we hand picked to put our finest results in", that's not mastering anything, it just means "if you know what's best for you (or not), just use this one".
Another similar wording is in IDE hard drives. Remember the fun time where you can to setup jumpers before your secondary IDE hard drive would work? Yeah that secondary drive is called "slave". I'm still confused why the first drive must be called "master" since I never see it whipping any other drives to make them work harder or really doing anything that's remotely controlling.
The computer guys in the old times really have a weird taste in naming things.
Well said. I think the slavery connotations in Git are not a big deal. But I have always disliked the word "master" because it never seemed well-suited for what role it played in the version control sphere. Labels like "main" or "primary" always seemed like better words to me, so I am glad that this change was made.
You betray your own ignorance. Master has been used historically to refer to the "final" or "canonical" copy. For example, you make copies of a CD based on the master. Creating that master copy is called mastering.
The word "master" stems from Latin, meaning "great" or "teacher". Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
Any slavery related connotations is insanely recent, and arguably manufactured specifically for the purpose of linguistic censorship. Historically, slave owners were referred to as... owners.
Seeing some of the complaints around this feels like people are somehow still stuck in 2020 instead of 2025. People need to do a fresh pull down from main and update their arguments.
Frankly I don't really care either way, main is shorter and conveys the same meaning so by my metrics it's better. You can override the default to be whatever you want.
From a third-world perspective, it feels like American politics being injected into the developer domain because of some previous biases that Americans had. Which is sad for a community that claims to be global.
Lots of Americans don't support this either. Of course, that doesn't actually matter to the people who have pushed this change through. They think that it's a righteous change, so it doesn't matter whom it annoys.
Lots of non Americans support the change too. Master was a terrible default name, switching it to a better name that’s also more inclusive language was a good idea. Where American politics infected things was the the reactionary response of people who are vehemently opposed to any attempt to fix problems that don’t directly effect them.
This whole 'master branch' outrage doesn't even make sense. Should saying things like:
"I've mastered computer programming." also be an offense?
We absolutely should deny and disregard these nonsensical demands _by principle_. What was even the actual case made by people who wanted this? And don't tell me "well it's not a big deal, just accept it don't whine about something so small", because that won't fly, or shouldn't at least.
Adulthood is about realizing people who 'just want to do real work' will always be fucked over by people who vocalize their needs and organize like-minded ones, justified or not.
Honest to God not something I care about but: this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for “master”. I do know some people _did_ care about the name. Sometimes surprisingly senior people who never supported a tech upgrade want the name changed. In any event, it’s done, “main” won, it’s fine, let’s move on.
Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.
I work in the field of film mastering (with countless product names with the word “master” in it) and luckily no one got the ridiculous idea in their head that we need to change this lingo.
Show me a single person who has a valid reason for me not calling my branch “master” or my bedroom “the master”. I honestly think this sort of ridiculing word policing is why we lost this last damned election. And if you’re somehow proud that you’ve renamed your git branches, you’re very likely a contributor to that lost election.
I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part.
As far as software goes, things are similar. The process of "Mastering" is an exception.
As far as git branches go, I am fine with main. It has two advantages over master aside from any culturual questions:
1. main is more self-explanatory for beginners who don't know how "master" was/is used in tech.
2. it is shorter. While two letters don't make a huge difference, that is still a subtile advantage.
Whether these two points alone are enough to justify the needed work (which is probably not a lot to be honest), IDK.
Makes sense when you release 3.0 and basically allowed to introduce breaking changes.
In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.
That "waste" of resources was absolutely tiny. Took me just some minutes. And I didn't do it because of DEI, just because I think it's a better name.
That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to.
At most you could argue that you needed to run one additional command when pushing the initial commit during this transitional period where GitLab/GitHub had updated the name but Git itself has not. Therefore, now we're back to square one with less "waste" as you put it.
Not at all. This is just about defaults. People can still choose arbitrary branch names. People can still set the default branch name, as I have:
I just think "master" is an awesome word. Master record. Mastering. It just sounds cool to me and I'm gonna keep using it.I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.
It's one of those things I couldn't care less about what it's actually called as long as it's uniform everywhere.
I had a few frustrated evenings of debugging when Github changed the default to main and my local scripts expected "master".
All fixed now, but still an annoyance. Don't think about it much anymore.
PSA: You can run one git command and ignore this change and associated drama entirely. I don't care which you prefer, but let's not pretend like main "won" when sticking with master is as easy as:
main won
When is Linux going to rename “man” which according to my employer is a non-inclusive word and flagged in pull requests
Yeah, or killing parents and children. sighs. People really need some context-awareness.
Has the Linux community thought through the implications of using words like "containerization", when millions of slaves are still shipped around in shipping containers [1]? Docker is problematic technology to say the least.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/slavery-in-libya-li...
Don't forget killing orphans and zombies.
I will not forget master and slave pins either. :D
What...?
I think they mean the kill/pkill. Not defending the silly chain of what-about arguments though.
The whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness.
Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.
There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.
... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.
In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.
> In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd.
BitKeeper, the VCS that preceded Git, used the terminology "master" and "slaves", so the association is not based on nothing:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f1...
It is based on nothing. It is not intended to be offensive, and it is not intended to be about slavery. Similarly how master and slave pins are not either, or how blacklist and whitelist are not about race either!
IMO for something to be offensive it has to have intention to be offensive. Otherwise it's misunderstanding.
Of course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it.
I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.
Is it silly though? With enough linguistic archeology I bet you can make this entire comment I'm writing right now extremely problematic and offensive. The linguistic treadmill means exactly that older terms change meaning back in time. They also change meaning FORWARD in time, meaning your inoffensive terms today will almost certainly be offensive in the future.
It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English.
Everyone needs to stop this nonsense.
> Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur
"Ände" is a slur? (excuse my lack of transductional skills)
They probably mean "slut". The word has the same meaning in Danish, by the way
It costs nothing and makes people happy so why be a jerk about it?
It’s non inclusive of people who think it’s stupid - their feelings are not taken under account.
If there was a case where that was more than a quantum of annoyance, where it actually was any kind of actual weight at all, maybe those incredibly small feelings might be interesting to weigh. But they're not. They're the smallest of feelings, weighing nothing. Making this change is the easiest lightest most obviously acceptable of wins.
I think those people are taken into account, and on balance are ignored because their argument is far less reasonable. "Slavery was one of the most awful things humans have ever done so we shouldn't continue to use the language of slavery to describe every day things because that diminishes the importance of our history" makes a lot more sense than "we should keep this terminology because it's tradition."
We fix things that are broken. That's progress.
"Was"? There are millions of people in slavery in the US penal system today. Entire cities like Dubai continue to be built by slaves. I, for one, find it to be extremely insulting towards their intelligence to think that unrelated use of the word "master" in a different context is somehow considered to be offensive.
Except the master branch has nothing to do with slavery. Master branch doesn't even rule over other branches. It's more like 'master bedroom.'
Someone else linked this historical document to show that the words in Git has indeed to do with a master-slave relationship: https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...
But as I said elsewhere, I do not care about that a lot. However, I do think those words are bad for other reasons because they do not illustrate the _actual_ role and relationships of branches in a VCS in a _good way_. If the master branch is not actually ruling over other branches, then it should be named something else, like "primary" as far as I am concerned.
> Except the master branch has nothing to do with slavery.
It did, it originated from Bitkeeper that literally used to the term "slave" to refer to non-master branches.
> It's more like 'master bedroom.'
This is even more ridiculous. Where do you think that term came from? What made that a master bedroom in comparison to the other bedrooms? Could it be because that was the one the master was sleeping in, in comparison to the ones slaves were sleeping in?
> costs nothing
The cost is measured primarily in time. Experts in git/GitHub just experience a little annoyance (per repo). But for new comers (esp self-learners) the cost is much higher (takes the form of dysfunctional instructions, tutorials, readmes), and at the margin could cause someone to give up on a tutorial.
Cost should be weighed up against benefits i.e. that those hurt or upset by use of the word 'master' would no longer be. It's highly questionable whether the term master ever upset anyone (not simply those who were upset by the idea that someone else could be upset by the term's use).
A second-order cost is the precedent. There isn't a word in the English language which cannot be interpreted as malevolent given enough effort from the interpreter. Therefore it can be a better strategy to accept that there exist words with multiple meanings depending on context, and live with this language feature/imperfection, rather than impose costly changes on everyone to benefit a (possibly non-existent) few.
My comment is about people being jerks in the backlash. It's done. Let it go.
Implying perfectly reasonable inquiry (namely, if 'master' is to be removed, why aren't other 'problematic' terms?) is a "jerk" for asking seems off to me.
This is a nitpick, dismissing others' questions and directing them to let it go, is overreach. That's not for you to determine. It's fine as a suggestion (especially if accompanied with your perception of why they ought to), but as a directive it comes across as though you assume you know what's better for someone else without evidence to support the assumption, or without it occurring to you that your assumption would be questioned.
The "just asking questions!" defense now? OP was curious about Linux's roadmap? C'mon now. The man page comment was clearly non-serious and mocking.
I agree the case for changing words like man, kill, and abort is weak (so weak that you perceived it as a joke), but the case for changing those words isn’t significantly weaker than was the case for changing master, and master was indeed changed. OP is right to question why the weak arguments in favour of changing master won, and if this shall continue unchecked.
Correction: it costs something (breaking with past convention which adds friction), and it makes some people unhappy and others unhappy. This is not a harmless, all-upside change the way you are making it out to be.
Because it goes hand-in-hand with the euphemism treadmill. I defer to the late great George Carlin's words on the subject:
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc or text form: https://www.lingq.com/en/learn-english-online/courses/87644/...Probably, because not everyone is made happy: some are annoyed. I am not going to enter the merit of either side.
you cant make people happy. Humans want always more. it's never enough
Are you alright?
Because that's newspeak.
Because it rewards stupidity.
This is closely related to the Heckler's Veto.
Something I wrote back when GitHub did this:
> This change does hurt people. Have you never seen a newbie struggle with an out of date tutorial? There’s fifteen years of books, tutorials, videos, and other learning material out there that assumes the use of `master`. It takes about a decade for these things to die off in the clear-cut cases. However this is not even a clear-cut case, because Git defaults to `master` and GitHub defaults to `main`, so the confusion will last longer.
> Version control is a hard enough concept to grasp well at the best of times. And now there’s going to be a bunch of newbies – many of whom will be black – getting frustrated and confused because they are following the tutorials as best as they can and not getting the results they expect. On balance, there is probably more harm done to black developers with this change than leaving things as they were. Haven’t you ever seen a young developer lose confidence when they are trying the best they can to follow instructions and it’s just not working? Disliking the fact that this is being done to new developers thoughtlessly is not “pointless”.
> There’s also the matter that everybody I have seen advocating for this change has been white, and the responses I have seen from black developers generally ranges from “this is pointless” to “this is [performative / virtue signalling]” (insert appropriate term depending upon whether they are left or right wing). People start with the assumption that this is clearly the right thing to do for black developers, but people assuming that don’t seem to be actually listening to black developers about this, or at the very least, only listen to the ones that agree with them.
> This could have been done in a better way – coördinate with the main Git project around changing the default across the board, plan an update to as much documentation as possible, and make it happen in sync. But GitHub charged in unilaterally, seemingly with an overactive case of a white saviour complex, with people like you telling everybody ”this change hurts nobody”. This was done in an entirely thoughtless manner and does hurt people.
— https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/jtrx1k/announcement_po...
Beyond what I originally wrote, you also had ridiculousness like `git init` creating a branch called `main` if you install Git through Apple developer tools and `git init` creating a branch called `master` if you install Git through Homebrew; or getting a repo with `main` if you initialise the repo on GitHub and then clone it locally, but getting a repo with `master` if you initialise the repo locally then push to GitHub.
I don’t especially care what the default is, but I do care that GitHub didn’t seem to give a shit about the disruption they caused as long as they looked like they were performing racial justice of some kind (whilst having zero black people in leadership!). Why wasn’t the change centralised through the Git project so everybody could make the change together?
https://web.archive.org/web/20201001133529/https://github.co...
Fortunately, with this change, everything will return to being in sync.
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How did Scrum Master escape this treatment?
Because the term Scrum Master wasn't derived from master/slave.
Git's concept of a master branch was borrowed from BitKeeper which used master/slave terminology. https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...
You're right. I'll call it Scrum Main now.
Does he have a MSc?
We didn't need for another argument against Scrum, but that's a very compelling one.
Whitespace?
"Sprint". "Bus factor"?
I’m disappointed that this headline will lead to more clicks. This is your reminder that in git the branch name is just a pointer to a commit. Renaming that pointer is relatively seamless on GitHub (https://github.com/github/renaming?tab=readme-ov-file#rename...). Also, git 3.0 isn’t forcing this change on existing repos, just new ones that no automation depends on. And if you really like the old name that’s always an option for your repos. Remember, it’s just a pointer.
The other git 3.0 changes are more consequential and worthy of discussion - changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security and performance, changing the storage format for performance and introducing Rust.
> changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security
Linus has a different view, he referred to the SHA-256 migration as "pointless churn": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCr_gb8rdEI?t=11m
SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.
> just new ones that no automation depends on
Except for automations that happen to create new repositories.
"trunk" would have at least matched the notion of "branches"
Huh. I always visualized "trunk" as some kind of chest where all the code was stored. Somehow it never occurred to me to think about trees. What a weird feeling.
What about "boot", to be more international?
trunk as in tree, not car. Cars don't have branches.
To go with the way the world is going, maybe "boot" and "licks" instead of "trunk" and "branches"? =)
oh, don't worry, somebody will be offended by this as well - "trunk" as a sexual slang term refers to a woman's buttocks.
Don't know why people here got triggered by DEI, but the "master" naming is just bad, "main" is actually a better and more generic description.
The word "master" means someone/thing that has the capability of controlling things, like "Mastered", "Master Degree" etc.
But in most Git contexts, "master" is just "one of the breach that we hand picked to put our finest results in", that's not mastering anything, it just means "if you know what's best for you (or not), just use this one".
Another similar wording is in IDE hard drives. Remember the fun time where you can to setup jumpers before your secondary IDE hard drive would work? Yeah that secondary drive is called "slave". I'm still confused why the first drive must be called "master" since I never see it whipping any other drives to make them work harder or really doing anything that's remotely controlling.
The computer guys in the old times really have a weird taste in naming things.
Interesting thought process. I always liked the “master” branch to a “master recording” since most branches are created off master.
Well said. I think the slavery connotations in Git are not a big deal. But I have always disliked the word "master" because it never seemed well-suited for what role it played in the version control sphere. Labels like "main" or "primary" always seemed like better words to me, so I am glad that this change was made.
You betray your own ignorance. Master has been used historically to refer to the "final" or "canonical" copy. For example, you make copies of a CD based on the master. Creating that master copy is called mastering.
The word "master" stems from Latin, meaning "great" or "teacher". Just as teachers pass on knowledge to students, data is copied from the master.
Any slavery related connotations is insanely recent, and arguably manufactured specifically for the purpose of linguistic censorship. Historically, slave owners were referred to as... owners.
Seeing some of the complaints around this feels like people are somehow still stuck in 2020 instead of 2025. People need to do a fresh pull down from main and update their arguments.
Frankly I don't really care either way, main is shorter and conveys the same meaning so by my metrics it's better. You can override the default to be whatever you want.
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From a third-world perspective, it feels like American politics being injected into the developer domain because of some previous biases that Americans had. Which is sad for a community that claims to be global.
Lots of Americans don't support this either. Of course, that doesn't actually matter to the people who have pushed this change through. They think that it's a righteous change, so it doesn't matter whom it annoys.
Lots of non Americans support the change too. Master was a terrible default name, switching it to a better name that’s also more inclusive language was a good idea. Where American politics infected things was the the reactionary response of people who are vehemently opposed to any attempt to fix problems that don’t directly effect them.
This whole 'master branch' outrage doesn't even make sense. Should saying things like: "I've mastered computer programming." also be an offense?
We absolutely should deny and disregard these nonsensical demands _by principle_. What was even the actual case made by people who wanted this? And don't tell me "well it's not a big deal, just accept it don't whine about something so small", because that won't fly, or shouldn't at least.
This is whining. Name it what you want.
Adulthood is about realizing people who 'just want to do real work' will always be fucked over by people who vocalize their needs and organize like-minded ones, justified or not.