Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Using the term master doesn't bother me - in my opinion the idea of the master/slave dynamic is much less problematic when you're talking in the context of bits and bytes flicking up and down on some silicon. Having said that, if it bothers people, change it. I do suspect to a certain extent though that people are more interested in changing it because they're worried it might be offensive to other people than actually finding it offensive themselves.

The follow up tweet from the original reqeustor is:

> 1. “Main” is shorter! Yay brevity!

> 2. It’s even easier to remember, tbh

> 3. If it makes any of my teammates feel an ounce more comfortable, let’s do it!

> 4. If it prevents even a single black person from feeling more isolated in the tech community, feels like a no brainer to me!

1 - Not sure that's an important reason, why not change it to just "M"?

2 - Not for people who are already using git and have lived their entire lives on master (or for those more considerate developers, have lived their entire lives PRing into master)

3 & 4 - This is what I'm talking about, is there anyone who is actually feeling isolated and uncomfortable, or are there just a load of white people who have focused on literally the most unimportant aspect of being a black person in the tech community?

> This is what I'm talking about, is there anyone who is actually feeling isolated and uncomfortable, or are there just a load of white people who have focused on literally the most unimportant aspect of being a black person in the tech community?

I'm a POC in the tech community and couldn't care less about "master" being problematic. The tweets you quoted likely came from a white person who thinks a little to highly of themselves and want to go after low-hanging fruit.

Want to make a difference for POCs and Black people? Vote the racists and profit-driven politicians out of office this November and replace them with people who are more qualified to lead and actually care about the public.

> ...people who are more qualified to lead and actually care about the public.

They're still politicians, right?

Anyone running for office is a politician. How they use their power is what sets them apart.

As a mysql DBA, this terminology issue made me uncomfortable for most of the past 15 years. I'm uncertain whether I agree that it's relevant in GitHub terms since we don't have upstream/master -> fork/slave, but it's inspired me to think about the term "master" in the mysql, git, and art proofing spaces simultaneously, so I'm glad they're making the change and I look forward to finding out what I think about it after some time has passed.

Databases have been slowly shifting to other terms for a while now. I.e. consensus algorithms typically speak about "leader election", replication systems use "primary"/"replica", ...

I totally agree with 1. If the shorter word is just as clear, it is better. "M" is not clear but "main" is.

And in fact, at work, we use both git and mercurial, and they have slightly different terminologies. In particular, git's "master" is mercurial's "default". The result is that we are sometimes mixing the two. And we naturally ended up calling the master/default branch the "main branch" with the understanding that it is "master" in git and "default" in mercurial.

That we naturally came up with this name means it is a good name. And because it is the shortest, it has my vote.

That you are all used to "master" is no excuse either. There are other version control systems than git, and "master" is not a universal convention. In mercurial, it is "default", and in SVN, it is "trunk". If you are a professional developer, you are probably going to use several different VCS during your career, and it is not a good thing getting too attached to "master".

The main problem I see with the change is that if you are just getting started with git, most training material will refer to "master", and having different conventions can make things confusing at first. Of course, experts know that there is nothing special about "master" and can adapt to any situation, but beginners need guidelines, and we might as well make them consistent.

So your decision rule is based solely on the word length if both words are similarly 'clear'? I can see how this rule can backfire in some cases...

> or are there just a load of white people who have focused on literally the most unimportant aspect of being a black person in the tech community?

Seems that way. It's actually offensive to suggest that such a person should be offended in the first place. It's a "we know better than you and you should be offended" attitude.

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