9 ms·

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

63 points by davecyen 6y ago

slater 6y ago
Good!
jakelazaroff 6y ago
This is a tiny change that has no substantial negative effect on anyone’s life. If they’d renamed “pull requests” to “merge requests” no one would care, at all. Let’s please not make a big deal out of it.
- unwoundmouse 6y ago
  You know, i highly doubt any developer black or not ever looked and said “wow this master branch naming really makes me feel oppressed.” If this is you, please correct me. However, i do know lots of developers have bash scripts, terminal aliases, python workers that use the “master” terminology that will need to be changed. This seems like an absurd and unnecessary change to me, causing more net damage than benefit. Beyond git, i believe master is a power dynamic that exists and is sometimes the best way to model a system - and we should attempt to describe systems clearly unrelated to racism as accurately as possible
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    sed -i 's/master/main/g' * Problem solved!
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    A lot of systems I use have renamed master/slave to leader/follower. It set me back a moment the first time I saw it, and took me about 30 seconds to mentally internalise the change. After that first time, no issues as a reader of the code/config.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      Leader/follower, primary/replica, sender/receiver, primary/fallback... not only do these phrases avoid the charged language of "master/slave", but they can also often describe the roles of the two components more precisely. The historical usage of "master/slave" for the two drives on an IDE channel is a great example of the imprecise use of these terms -- it implies a relationship between the devices that doesn't exist at all. Both devices respond directly to commands from the host; the second device on the channel is not under the command of the first one.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    Why do their scripts need to be change? It's not retroactively modifying repos.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - madsmith 6y ago
    As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad. Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain. I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      Perhaps you mean "attempt to blackwash history"...
    - tehlike 6y ago
      And it's all very us centric too. In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.
      - eesmith 6y ago
        GitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.
        tehlike 6y ago
        So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.
        eesmith 6y ago
        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.
  - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
    This past summer I helped teach a bunch of students to code, students who were from under-represented populations here in the U.S. They were horrified to learn where the 'master' term came from. Switching from master to main is a good change. The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper). It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ). Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :) ---------------------------------------------- [0]: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4 https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4 [1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra...
    - eesmith 6y ago
      A couple of months ago I collected a few similar accounts, which were either given on HN or directly linked to from HN, over the past 10+ years of discussion of this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739
    - dariosalvi78 6y ago
      Do you that the word "liberty" comes from the Latin "libertas" which means the "condition of being not a slave"? Tell it to your students next time and let's all make a fuss about the use of the word.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    As we transition to more dynamic clusters from older fixed infrastructure arrangements of the past, some of that terminology is dying on its own (not to imply we shouldn’t help it along). Leader, for instance, implies a more fluid arrangement of the chain of command that better reflects what happens when a new machine takes over for a server that is having problems or being maintained.
- s9w 6y ago
  It is a big deal since it's a show of force that the mob can force them to buckle. They can literally change the words you use.
- bagels 6y ago
  Changing it is making something out of it. Are people actually offended by the current usage?
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  No. This silliness is being done, allegedly, for my sake as a minority, and I will not countenance it. If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater".
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    > If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater". I am a minority in that I am left-handed. I have not yet discovered my minority powers but I'm sure they are growing and will make themselves clear to me one day so I can take my rightful place among the pantheon of minorities. To be honest, I hope the opposite is true in that I do hope that the "diversity theatre" will be closed before that time, never to be opened again. Those who play in that theatre claim to support minorities but in fact all they do is drive people apart. It is as if their real purpose is to corral people into minority enclaves, to divide and conquer.
- scottmsul 6y ago
  I disagree. Renaming "pull requests" to "merge requests" isn't politically motivated, whereas this is a top-down change from political activists. I'm worried that society might go down a path where people can't push back out of fear of one's career or safety.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Very related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Political activists aren’t in positions of power at GitHub, so it’s not a top-down change. I also disagree that it’s especially political. It’s a small name change to be more considerate. The only reason this is “political” — and “merge requests” wouldn’t be — is that for some reason a small group of people are very loudly offended by it.
    - loopz 6y ago
      A change from people in power is the very definition of top-down change. Words convey meaning. It's hardly surprising the priesthood of developers rally against any changes to their sacrosankt nonsensical namings. Merge is different from pull/push though.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        Policy changes can only come from people in power. I’m just saying the people in power at GitHub are not political activists. Pull is literally an alias for fetch followed by merge. GitLab already calls them merge requests, which caused approximately zero drama, so we have empirical evidence that no one actually cares about these things when they can’t pretend to be offended by them.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  It's a change of territory in what amounts to cultural trench warfare. Partisans are constantly antfucking over what is and isn't appropriate terminology, or what constitutes a thinly veiled existential threat. The change's symbolic significance vastly outweighs its immediate consequence, and naturally people will respond to it within the context it's been made.
- justaj 6y ago
  There's already incredible amount of documentation around that uses the word "master". (New) people getting aboard will undoubtedly read the (now stale) documentation and get confused, confusion results in questions, questions result in discussions and discussions take time away from the already overburdened FOSS contributors that make great things happen. All of this to give an appearance that social change is happening? Why not address the social issues head-on?
  - syspec 6y ago
    This only affects new repositories
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- arvigeus 6y ago
  Think of all books and online articles that assume that ‘git push —origin master’ is a valid command. What about other companies who don’t adopt this change? Imagine you have to write an article about git and suddenly half of your readers start to complain that your examples don’t work. Yes, software do change a lot, but usually changes having such high impact are carefully thought out if the benefits outweigh negatives. Even people supporting this can’t give any compelling reasons other than “it’s nicer”. If we take this change out of the current context and let’s say someone suggested that a year ago, do you think it would get the same traction?
brnt 6y ago
I've a Master of Science degree, will that chance too? Is anyone offended by that terminology? [Edit] maybe I should clarify: in my native language master only has the connotation of mastery of a subject. A slave owner can't be called 'master', so we don't have that unpleasant crossover.
- minxomat 6y ago
  The line is always drawn somewhere, to answer the not very well veiled slippery slope argument. If and when that applies to this specific case, history will show. No one demands everything happen all at once.
  - brnt 6y ago
    I didn't try to make a slippery slope argument. I just want to know if someone considers that title unpleasant, and if so what the alternative could be (not Main of Science obviously).
    - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
      This could be an awesomely fun sub-thread. Here's my ideas to get things started: How about 'Science Wizard'? '<Your name here> The Science <Guy/Gal/Person>' 'Expert of Science' What have the rest of you got? :)
      - brnt 6y ago
        There's really three titles, right? Bachelor, master and doctor. To me, the first was always the weirdest if the bunch, and if we're renaming things, maybe we could confer the hierarchy of the titles? What's a good synonym for mastery? How can you describe someone who has mastered something? Expert, OK. What else?
        MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        In the US we've got 12 levels (years) of primary and secondary education, followed by 'higher' education. Here at least I suppose you could call a bachelor's something like "16th grade", or "Level 16". Different Masters and PhDs require different numbers of years, though, so it's not a great system. How about something like "Practitioner" instead of Bachelors, "Expert" instead of Masters, and stick with Doctorate for the PhD?
beebmam 6y ago
I've always thought "master" was a weird name for the default branch
- cyphar 6y ago
  The logic behind the name was that it was like a master record which all other copies (branches) were based on. To be honest I think the original terminology of "trunk" always made more sense given that we have things called "branches" (and the first commit is called the "root commit"). But "main" is probably lees cryptic -- I will admit when I first heard the term "trunk" I thought it was referring to either the UK term for suitcase or US term for a car's boot. And of course git has a general principle of never copying anything that SVN did, I guess that includes naming.
  - andreareina 6y ago
    IIRC git got "master" from BitKeeper.
nprateem 6y ago
"Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms." FFS. Is this some kind of joke? This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers. I believe a lot of people realize that, and that's why it was flagged.
susam 6y ago
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 development branch. We will create other release branches from it. Imagine a tree with a trunk from which other branches grow." One is less likely to ask, "What is the main branch?" The branch name is self-explanatory.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Master also means principal. Controlling speech due to political correctness is extremely post modern but I’m not sure that language creates reality in the way these people seem to think. Words are not inherently racist it’s how people use them, therefore I’m against changes like these where clearly there’s no racism at all in having a master branch.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Post modern probably doesn't mean what you didn't think it means. Words can be cool, but misused.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      It is you who doesn’t understand post modernism, here’s a definition about reality being constructed rather than based on science: https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html “ In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.” Hence why the explanation that master should be changed to main to avoid some people thinking git and GitHub are racist.
      - loopz 6y ago
        I stand corrected. Thanks!
justRafi 6y ago
'master' branch is like a master recording, an original from which copies can be made off. I don't have a Master degree in English, but it feels someone is terribly confused.
- echelon 6y ago
  I feel like we tried to fix "master" and "slave" in replication terminology (which we should) and it leaked into areas where the semantics were entirely different. "Whitelist" and "blacklist" are also terms that deserve attention, more so than "master branch". The "master" branch is the "master" record. The official copy. The entertainment industry "remasters" their source recordings. The original Star Wars gets remastered frequently. I don't think that the recording and entertainment industries are going to change these terms, because I don't think they're racially charged in the context in which they're defined and used. There's literally no parallel. In our industry, we have other suspect things called master, which is why it stands out. In any case, I think it's impossible to rethink this decision now. Walking it back feels icky and political, and we should always err on the side of inclusion anyway.
  - activitypea 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure Git calls the default branch master in reference to a master recording.
- Joeri 6y ago
  The naming is not accurate though. Many projects branch off from “development” and periodically merge into master. Calling it main more aptly describes the role it has.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    If anything the commit tree structure of git warrants “trunk” far more than ever made sense in subversion.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  That is not why it’s called that: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
627467 6y ago
Performative activism. Master example of avoiding dealing with real issues.
- spikeseltzer 6y ago
  What’s an example of a real issue, if changing terminology to make underrepresented engineers feel less uncomfortable isn’t one?
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    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.
  - 627467 6y ago
    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.
    - spikeseltzer 6y ago
      Not implying that at all — although I do think we should prioritize the concerns of those who are currently underrepresented, especially when they regularly observe racism in our industry on that basis. > 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. Regarding this I’m not sure what mechanism you had in mind for github to solve these issues, but it sounds like the sort of thing I’d support as well. I’ve campaigned for them to drop their contract with ICE for some time now, maybe you have too.
astraloverflow 6y ago
The etymology of "master" according to Wiktionary: From Middle English maister, mayster, meister, from Old English mǣster, mæġster, mæġester, mæġister, magister (“master”), from Latin magister (“chief, teacher, leader”), from Old Latin magester, from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s, (as in magnus (“great”)) + -ester/-ister
- crooked-v 6y ago
  An etymology of the phrases predating this specific use of 'master' (such as 'master recording') might be helpful, but the word 'master' by itself really isn't.
userbinator 6y ago
"Inclusivity includes idiocy." If you've ever wondered why software quality has taken a nosedive in recent years... "At least we're diverse!" Thanks for all the downvotes. The bias in here is really obvious. ;-)
emerged 6y ago
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.
- brnt 6y ago
  It is my experience that people that call themselves rational are some of the least rational people.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Rationalists fail to realize two unfalsifiable facts: A) Own shortcomings and lack of healthy self-doubt. B) That life is 100% subjective. There is no objective authority to be found.
- amazingman 6y ago
  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.
  - emerged 6y ago
    I mean the extent of my fighting is to type a comment in response to the post. I won't be organizing a group with signs and marching or anything.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    That kind of thinking is why we have had riots destroying our cities, arsonists starting wildfires and burning churches, and spikes in the homicide rate this decade.
    - stnmtn 6y ago
      Yes, changing the name of github's default branch to something that makes more sense is the reason there are nationwide protests right now. For sure man Isn't it fun when you can just say words out loud and make it look like you have a point?
zerocrates 6y ago
Is there any movement on the Git side? I'm assuming this doesn't actually apply if you follow the more "classic" method of creating a Github repo: creating a local git repo and just adding Github as a remote. Edit: I figured that Git itself probably wouldn't change the default branch name (at least not easily), but thought that just making it configurable would be a "neutral" way to make it easier for people to do this if they wanted to. I guess they, in fact, already did that: https://superuser.com/a/1572156 https://superuser.com/a/1572156
- nprateem 6y ago
  > Is there any movement on the Git side? Why should there be?
non-entity 6y ago
I'm having trouble understanding why this was flagged. It covers a major change to tool many (most?) developers use including time and reasoning. It's straight to the point, doesn't seem to seem to have much fluff, and isn't really trained with author's option / ideology. Surely much worse and off topic political articles reach the front page without being mass flagged. On a random note, I've had vouch for flagged articles / comments before but it seems to very irregular. What decides if the "vouch" option is available to a user?
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  A lot of people are tired of seeing "culture wars" threads, including most likely the mods, since they seem to devolve into a mess of bickering posts. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it. I'm tired of these threads too but to express no opinion is to allow others to drive the direction of changes that affect our industry.
bhaak 6y ago
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.
- loopz 6y ago
  main seems like a better word overall, though not to be confused with main.go.
  - bhaak 6y ago
    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.
- underyx 6y ago
  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.
  - bhaak 6y ago
    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).
    - underyx 6y ago
      It's less rare than you think. Lots of repos use "develop", or "trunk" as their default, for instance.
      - bhaak 6y ago
throwaway_bwicd 6y ago
We already have a problem with frequent and, in many cases avoidable, API/interface changes in our industry. Think about the last time you use some library, then it's API changes, and you spend a day fixing this in your codebase. The fact that this change affects only new repos is not reassuring. There are tons of tutorials, scripts and other stuff out there relying on the default naming ("upstream" is the other branch name that is frequently used). Git is already complex enough, especially for beginners. Also, other git hosting services (and git itself) still use "master" as the default branch name, which will create even more confusion.
justRafi 6y ago
I don't think you can erase words from the vocabulary to get rid of bad undertones in society. If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily offended, and might be onto on some crusade. Renaming variables and tech paradigms that refer to computer idioms, not people, is lame. The real problem is misconception and bigotry in people's hearts. We could stop using the sex/porn industry and reduce the human trafficking epidemic in some countries, or completely stop buying from companies that manufacture in horrible conditions.. or change computer idioms and debate until we're blue.
- drdaeman 6y ago
  > If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily offended Worse, it feels like people are taught to be offended more easily, driving the sensitivity up to the max. <offtopic> > We could stop using the sex/porn industry Not going to happen. This industry had existed since times immemorial and is going to exist no matter what for as long as humans will have sex drive (and thus, fantasies and desires). Painting sexual and/or pornographic services as something inherently bad is only going to make it worse by driving industry into a darker shade. I could be terribly mistaken here (and beg pardon and counterarguments if I am), but in my understanding it's social and legal stigmas are what's primarily hurting people. I don't mean to say there are no issues with that industry. Just saying that blaming it's very existence is not a solution. And - as a personal opinion - there's nothing wrong with sex or porn, as long as it's all well-informed, safe, sane and consensual. </offtopic>
rich_sasha 6y ago
In one swift stroke, GitHub fixed racism and diversity issues in tech. And all that without spending a penny, awkward outreach programmes or deep soul-searching as to the roots of the problem. In your face, naysayers. Oh, wait...
dariosalvi78 6y ago
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.
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  Not black or USA nationality, but this is not revisionism. The origin of the term in gut is in the master/slave concept and because that’s an ugly (and pointless) association the term is evolving. Terms change. We will adapt just fine, and “main” is a better name anyway, as others have pointed out here in this thread.
  - dariosalvi78 6y ago
    The change of the name is not motivated by a better semantical fitness, it's motivated exclusively by the recent, and well justified, political movements in the US. People out there are asking to be treated like human beings and not shot by the police and all they get is a change of a word that has absolutely nothing to do with their conditions or context. Nothing changes for developers, true, but absolutely nothing changes for black people in the US neither. I find it an hypocrisy, which is why I don't like it.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  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.
Tomis02 6y ago
I don't have a problem with changing the name but the motivation bothers me. For years we've had unintuitive/unfriendly names - an example on this thread was "pull requests", name picked by someone who was so high that he was seeing himself from the 3rd person, in a mirror, while standing on their head. God forbid we change the names so that they actually start making sense; oh no, we stick with V1 til the heat death of the universe, we wouldn't want to confuse already confused developers by fixing the dumb thing. Ok, fine, now that you've started, will you fix the rest of the names too? The ones that aren't politically charged, that is.
sceptical 6y ago
Rename of master branch is happening at the company I work at. I find it rather pointless but the company is paying for my time so if they want me to spend time on this then fine by me. I will still call it the master branch though.
ykevinator 6y ago
This is probably a good idea. Nothing else is working.
jaimex2 6y ago
Lets take bets on the next white guilt label change: I'm betting Master Chef or Master degrees.
jaimex2 6y ago
Wonder if Microsoft will be renaming the main character of their Halo games too :)
- valand 6y ago
  No, it's trunk chief
ibobev 6y ago
I suspect that it is not far away the day when the academic degree "master of science" will also be renamed. :) It is complete insanity. We are starting to live in Orwellian world. If you remember in 1984 the abonamation of the language in a way to not allow wrong thinking was one of the characteristics of the totalitarian government. :(

63 points by davecyen 6y ago

Good!

This is a tiny change that has no substantial negative effect on anyone’s life. If they’d renamed “pull requests” to “merge requests” no one would care, at all. Let’s please not make a big deal out of it.

unwoundmouse 6y ago
You know, i highly doubt any developer black or not ever looked and said “wow this master branch naming really makes me feel oppressed.” If this is you, please correct me. However, i do know lots of developers have bash scripts, terminal aliases, python workers that use the “master” terminology that will need to be changed. This seems like an absurd and unnecessary change to me, causing more net damage than benefit. Beyond git, i believe master is a power dynamic that exists and is sometimes the best way to model a system - and we should attempt to describe systems clearly unrelated to racism as accurately as possible
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  sed -i 's/master/main/g' * Problem solved!
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  A lot of systems I use have renamed master/slave to leader/follower. It set me back a moment the first time I saw it, and took me about 30 seconds to mentally internalise the change. After that first time, no issues as a reader of the code/config.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Leader/follower, primary/replica, sender/receiver, primary/fallback... not only do these phrases avoid the charged language of "master/slave", but they can also often describe the roles of the two components more precisely. The historical usage of "master/slave" for the two drives on an IDE channel is a great example of the imprecise use of these terms -- it implies a relationship between the devices that doesn't exist at all. Both devices respond directly to commands from the host; the second device on the channel is not under the command of the first one.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Why do their scripts need to be change? It's not retroactively modifying repos.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- madsmith 6y ago
  As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad. Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain. I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Perhaps you mean "attempt to blackwash history"...
  - tehlike 6y ago
    And it's all very us centric too. In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.
    - eesmith 6y ago
      GitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.
      - tehlike 6y ago
        So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.
        eesmith 6y ago
        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.
- MikeTheGreat 6y ago
  This past summer I helped teach a bunch of students to code, students who were from under-represented populations here in the U.S. They were horrified to learn where the 'master' term came from. Switching from master to main is a good change. The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper). It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ). Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :) ---------------------------------------------- [0]: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4 https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm#pt4 [1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra...
  - eesmith 6y ago
    A couple of months ago I collected a few similar accounts, which were either given on HN or directly linked to from HN, over the past 10+ years of discussion of this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763739
  - dariosalvi78 6y ago
    Do you that the word "liberty" comes from the Latin "libertas" which means the "condition of being not a slave"? Tell it to your students next time and let's all make a fuss about the use of the word.
- hinkley 6y ago
  As we transition to more dynamic clusters from older fixed infrastructure arrangements of the past, some of that terminology is dying on its own (not to imply we shouldn’t help it along). Leader, for instance, implies a more fluid arrangement of the chain of command that better reflects what happens when a new machine takes over for a server that is having problems or being maintained.
s9w 6y ago
It is a big deal since it's a show of force that the mob can force them to buckle. They can literally change the words you use.
bagels 6y ago
Changing it is making something out of it. Are people actually offended by the current usage?
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
No. This silliness is being done, allegedly, for my sake as a minority, and I will not countenance it. If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater".
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  > If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater". I am a minority in that I am left-handed. I have not yet discovered my minority powers but I'm sure they are growing and will make themselves clear to me one day so I can take my rightful place among the pantheon of minorities. To be honest, I hope the opposite is true in that I do hope that the "diversity theatre" will be closed before that time, never to be opened again. Those who play in that theatre claim to support minorities but in fact all they do is drive people apart. It is as if their real purpose is to corral people into minority enclaves, to divide and conquer.
scottmsul 6y ago
I disagree. Renaming "pull requests" to "merge requests" isn't politically motivated, whereas this is a top-down change from political activists. I'm worried that society might go down a path where people can't push back out of fear of one's career or safety.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Very related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Political activists aren’t in positions of power at GitHub, so it’s not a top-down change. I also disagree that it’s especially political. It’s a small name change to be more considerate. The only reason this is “political” — and “merge requests” wouldn’t be — is that for some reason a small group of people are very loudly offended by it.
  - loopz 6y ago
    A change from people in power is the very definition of top-down change. Words convey meaning. It's hardly surprising the priesthood of developers rally against any changes to their sacrosankt nonsensical namings. Merge is different from pull/push though.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Policy changes can only come from people in power. I’m just saying the people in power at GitHub are not political activists. Pull is literally an alias for fetch followed by merge. GitLab already calls them merge requests, which caused approximately zero drama, so we have empirical evidence that no one actually cares about these things when they can’t pretend to be offended by them.
crocodiletears 6y ago
It's a change of territory in what amounts to cultural trench warfare. Partisans are constantly antfucking over what is and isn't appropriate terminology, or what constitutes a thinly veiled existential threat. The change's symbolic significance vastly outweighs its immediate consequence, and naturally people will respond to it within the context it's been made.
justaj 6y ago
There's already incredible amount of documentation around that uses the word "master". (New) people getting aboard will undoubtedly read the (now stale) documentation and get confused, confusion results in questions, questions result in discussions and discussions take time away from the already overburdened FOSS contributors that make great things happen. All of this to give an appearance that social change is happening? Why not address the social issues head-on?
- syspec 6y ago
  This only affects new repositories
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
arvigeus 6y ago
Think of all books and online articles that assume that ‘git push —origin master’ is a valid command. What about other companies who don’t adopt this change? Imagine you have to write an article about git and suddenly half of your readers start to complain that your examples don’t work. Yes, software do change a lot, but usually changes having such high impact are carefully thought out if the benefits outweigh negatives. Even people supporting this can’t give any compelling reasons other than “it’s nicer”. If we take this change out of the current context and let’s say someone suggested that a year ago, do you think it would get the same traction?

brnt 6y ago

I've a Master of Science degree, will that chance too? Is anyone offended by that terminology? [Edit] maybe I should clarify: in my native language master only has the connotation of mastery of a subject. A slave owner can't be called 'master', so we don't have that unpleasant crossover.

minxomat 6y ago
The line is always drawn somewhere, to answer the not very well veiled slippery slope argument. If and when that applies to this specific case, history will show. No one demands everything happen all at once.
- brnt 6y ago
  I didn't try to make a slippery slope argument. I just want to know if someone considers that title unpleasant, and if so what the alternative could be (not Main of Science obviously).
  - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
    This could be an awesomely fun sub-thread. Here's my ideas to get things started: How about 'Science Wizard'? '<Your name here> The Science <Guy/Gal/Person>' 'Expert of Science' What have the rest of you got? :)
    - brnt 6y ago
      There's really three titles, right? Bachelor, master and doctor. To me, the first was always the weirdest if the bunch, and if we're renaming things, maybe we could confer the hierarchy of the titles? What's a good synonym for mastery? How can you describe someone who has mastered something? Expert, OK. What else?
      - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        In the US we've got 12 levels (years) of primary and secondary education, followed by 'higher' education. Here at least I suppose you could call a bachelor's something like "16th grade", or "Level 16". Different Masters and PhDs require different numbers of years, though, so it's not a great system. How about something like "Practitioner" instead of Bachelors, "Expert" instead of Masters, and stick with Doctorate for the PhD?

beebmam 6y ago

I've always thought "master" was a weird name for the default branch

cyphar 6y ago
The logic behind the name was that it was like a master record which all other copies (branches) were based on. To be honest I think the original terminology of "trunk" always made more sense given that we have things called "branches" (and the first commit is called the "root commit"). But "main" is probably lees cryptic -- I will admit when I first heard the term "trunk" I thought it was referring to either the UK term for suitcase or US term for a car's boot. And of course git has a general principle of never copying anything that SVN did, I guess that includes naming.
- andreareina 6y ago
  IIRC git got "master" from BitKeeper.

nprateem 6y ago

"Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms." FFS. Is this some kind of joke? This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers.

luckylion 6y ago
> This sort of PC bullshit is gold for rightwingers. I believe a lot of people realize that, and that's why it was flagged.

susam 6y ago

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 development branch. We will create other release branches from it. Imagine a tree with a trunk from which other branches grow." One is less likely to ask, "What is the main branch?" The branch name is self-explanatory.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Master also means principal. Controlling speech due to political correctness is extremely post modern but I’m not sure that language creates reality in the way these people seem to think. Words are not inherently racist it’s how people use them, therefore I’m against changes like these where clearly there’s no racism at all in having a master branch.
- loopz 6y ago
  Post modern probably doesn't mean what you didn't think it means. Words can be cool, but misused.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    It is you who doesn’t understand post modernism, here’s a definition about reality being constructed rather than based on science: https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html “ In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.” Hence why the explanation that master should be changed to main to avoid some people thinking git and GitHub are racist.
    - loopz 6y ago
      I stand corrected. Thanks!

justRafi 6y ago

'master' branch is like a master recording, an original from which copies can be made off. I don't have a Master degree in English, but it feels someone is terribly confused.

echelon 6y ago
I feel like we tried to fix "master" and "slave" in replication terminology (which we should) and it leaked into areas where the semantics were entirely different. "Whitelist" and "blacklist" are also terms that deserve attention, more so than "master branch". The "master" branch is the "master" record. The official copy. The entertainment industry "remasters" their source recordings. The original Star Wars gets remastered frequently. I don't think that the recording and entertainment industries are going to change these terms, because I don't think they're racially charged in the context in which they're defined and used. There's literally no parallel. In our industry, we have other suspect things called master, which is why it stands out. In any case, I think it's impossible to rethink this decision now. Walking it back feels icky and political, and we should always err on the side of inclusion anyway.
- activitypea 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure Git calls the default branch master in reference to a master recording.
Joeri 6y ago
The naming is not accurate though. Many projects branch off from “development” and periodically merge into master. Calling it main more aptly describes the role it has.
- hinkley 6y ago
  If anything the commit tree structure of git warrants “trunk” far more than ever made sense in subversion.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
That is not why it’s called that: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

627467 6y ago

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

spikeseltzer 6y ago
What’s an example of a real issue, if changing terminology to make underrepresented engineers feel less uncomfortable isn’t one?
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  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.
- 627467 6y ago
  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.
  - spikeseltzer 6y ago
    Not implying that at all — although I do think we should prioritize the concerns of those who are currently underrepresented, especially when they regularly observe racism in our industry on that basis. > 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. Regarding this I’m not sure what mechanism you had in mind for github to solve these issues, but it sounds like the sort of thing I’d support as well. I’ve campaigned for them to drop their contract with ICE for some time now, maybe you have too.

astraloverflow 6y ago

The etymology of "master" according to Wiktionary: From Middle English maister, mayster, meister, from Old English mǣster, mæġster, mæġester, mæġister, magister (“master”), from Latin magister (“chief, teacher, leader”), from Old Latin magester, from Proto-Indo-European *méǵh₂s, (as in magnus (“great”)) + -ester/-ister

crooked-v 6y ago
An etymology of the phrases predating this specific use of 'master' (such as 'master recording') might be helpful, but the word 'master' by itself really isn't.

userbinator 6y ago

"Inclusivity includes idiocy." If you've ever wondered why software quality has taken a nosedive in recent years... "At least we're diverse!" Thanks for all the downvotes. The bias in here is really obvious. ;-)

emerged 6y ago

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.

brnt 6y ago
It is my experience that people that call themselves rational are some of the least rational people.
- loopz 6y ago
  Rationalists fail to realize two unfalsifiable facts: A) Own shortcomings and lack of healthy self-doubt. B) That life is 100% subjective. There is no objective authority to be found.
amazingman 6y ago
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.
- emerged 6y ago
  I mean the extent of my fighting is to type a comment in response to the post. I won't be organizing a group with signs and marching or anything.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  That kind of thinking is why we have had riots destroying our cities, arsonists starting wildfires and burning churches, and spikes in the homicide rate this decade.
  - stnmtn 6y ago
    Yes, changing the name of github's default branch to something that makes more sense is the reason there are nationwide protests right now. For sure man Isn't it fun when you can just say words out loud and make it look like you have a point?

zerocrates 6y ago

Is there any movement on the Git side? I'm assuming this doesn't actually apply if you follow the more "classic" method of creating a Github repo: creating a local git repo and just adding Github as a remote. Edit: I figured that Git itself probably wouldn't change the default branch name (at least not easily), but thought that just making it configurable would be a "neutral" way to make it easier for people to do this if they wanted to. I guess they, in fact, already did that: https://superuser.com/a/1572156 https://superuser.com/a/1572156

nprateem 6y ago
> Is there any movement on the Git side? Why should there be?

non-entity 6y ago

I'm having trouble understanding why this was flagged. It covers a major change to tool many (most?) developers use including time and reasoning. It's straight to the point, doesn't seem to seem to have much fluff, and isn't really trained with author's option / ideology. Surely much worse and off topic political articles reach the front page without being mass flagged. On a random note, I've had vouch for flagged articles / comments before but it seems to very irregular. What decides if the "vouch" option is available to a user?

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
A lot of people are tired of seeing "culture wars" threads, including most likely the mods, since they seem to devolve into a mess of bickering posts. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it. I'm tired of these threads too but to express no opinion is to allow others to drive the direction of changes that affect our industry.

bhaak 6y ago

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.

loopz 6y ago
main seems like a better word overall, though not to be confused with main.go.
- bhaak 6y ago
  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.
underyx 6y ago
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.
- bhaak 6y ago
  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).
  - underyx 6y ago
    It's less rare than you think. Lots of repos use "develop", or "trunk" as their default, for instance.
    - bhaak 6y ago

throwaway_bwicd 6y ago

We already have a problem with frequent and, in many cases avoidable, API/interface changes in our industry. Think about the last time you use some library, then it's API changes, and you spend a day fixing this in your codebase. The fact that this change affects only new repos is not reassuring. There are tons of tutorials, scripts and other stuff out there relying on the default naming ("upstream" is the other branch name that is frequently used). Git is already complex enough, especially for beginners. Also, other git hosting services (and git itself) still use "master" as the default branch name, which will create even more confusion.

justRafi 6y ago

I don't think you can erase words from the vocabulary to get rid of bad undertones in society. If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily offended, and might be onto on some crusade. Renaming variables and tech paradigms that refer to computer idioms, not people, is lame. The real problem is misconception and bigotry in people's hearts. We could stop using the sex/porn industry and reduce the human trafficking epidemic in some countries, or completely stop buying from companies that manufacture in horrible conditions.. or change computer idioms and debate until we're blue.

drdaeman 6y ago
> If someone is offended by a "master" branch name, I suspect they are easily offended Worse, it feels like people are taught to be offended more easily, driving the sensitivity up to the max. <offtopic> > We could stop using the sex/porn industry Not going to happen. This industry had existed since times immemorial and is going to exist no matter what for as long as humans will have sex drive (and thus, fantasies and desires). Painting sexual and/or pornographic services as something inherently bad is only going to make it worse by driving industry into a darker shade. I could be terribly mistaken here (and beg pardon and counterarguments if I am), but in my understanding it's social and legal stigmas are what's primarily hurting people. I don't mean to say there are no issues with that industry. Just saying that blaming it's very existence is not a solution. And - as a personal opinion - there's nothing wrong with sex or porn, as long as it's all well-informed, safe, sane and consensual. </offtopic>

rich_sasha 6y ago

In one swift stroke, GitHub fixed racism and diversity issues in tech. And all that without spending a penny, awkward outreach programmes or deep soul-searching as to the roots of the problem. In your face, naysayers. Oh, wait...

dariosalvi78 6y ago

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.

thundergolfer 6y ago
Not black or USA nationality, but this is not revisionism. The origin of the term in gut is in the master/slave concept and because that’s an ugly (and pointless) association the term is evolving. Terms change. We will adapt just fine, and “main” is a better name anyway, as others have pointed out here in this thread.
- dariosalvi78 6y ago
  The change of the name is not motivated by a better semantical fitness, it's motivated exclusively by the recent, and well justified, political movements in the US. People out there are asking to be treated like human beings and not shot by the police and all they get is a change of a word that has absolutely nothing to do with their conditions or context. Nothing changes for developers, true, but absolutely nothing changes for black people in the US neither. I find it an hypocrisy, which is why I don't like it.
throw_m239339 6y ago
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.

Tomis02 6y ago

I don't have a problem with changing the name but the motivation bothers me. For years we've had unintuitive/unfriendly names - an example on this thread was "pull requests", name picked by someone who was so high that he was seeing himself from the 3rd person, in a mirror, while standing on their head. God forbid we change the names so that they actually start making sense; oh no, we stick with V1 til the heat death of the universe, we wouldn't want to confuse already confused developers by fixing the dumb thing. Ok, fine, now that you've started, will you fix the rest of the names too? The ones that aren't politically charged, that is.

sceptical 6y ago

Rename of master branch is happening at the company I work at. I find it rather pointless but the company is paying for my time so if they want me to spend time on this then fine by me. I will still call it the master branch though.

ykevinator 6y ago

This is probably a good idea. Nothing else is working.

jaimex2 6y ago

Lets take bets on the next white guilt label change: I'm betting Master Chef or Master degrees.

jaimex2 6y ago

Wonder if Microsoft will be renaming the main character of their Halo games too :)

valand 6y ago
No, it's trunk chief

ibobev 6y ago

I suspect that it is not far away the day when the academic degree "master of science" will also be renamed. :) It is complete insanity. We are starting to live in Orwellian world. If you remember in 1984 the abonamation of the language in a way to not allow wrong thinking was one of the characteristics of the totalitarian government. :(