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Comment by tough | Hacker News Reader

Ohh c'mon seriously.

This is absurd and will break lots of docs

bye to --set-upstream origin master

Docs are less likely to be broken if GitHub implements some automated, global way to rename the main branch: when this isn't done in an ad-hoc, per-repo way, they can implement logic to redirect URLs.

(Or, for a quick and dirty fix, always redirect master to the main branch)

What if you already have a main branch?

It's not absurd. It will break a lot of docs.

We will live.

It will break a lot of code and a lot of tools. For what? To virtue signal about something that has nothing to do with the current civil rights movement?

Should we change the word master data? Git is also an offensive term. This is absurd.

Git is a self deprecating name. It's not a term that normalizes (very) bad behavior.

"Gimp" is a better example of a bad name.

"It will break a lot of code"

Yes, because there's no precedent for non-essential changes which break code. Maybe there's a good reason not to change the "master/slave" terminology but this sure as hell ain't it.

Once again, the usage here has nothing to do with master-slave idea. Obviously there is precedent for breaking changes. The benefits must outweigh the costs, the cost here is monumental, and the benefit here is non-existent.

>and the benefit here is non-existent.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for this change to occur. But clearly others disagree with you on this bit.

I sense a bad faith interpretation of the word "offensive."

The issue with master/slave is way more than "it's offensive." By changing the language, people are taking explicit steps to move away from language rooted in racism. That's an important part of moving a culture away from normalization of oppression of minorities.

No, it's still insane, because it assumes that humans don't have two brain cells and cannot understand context. Master/slave make sense in context where....that's exactly what these things are. Why call them something else? Because these words, when used in a human context, are or can be offensive?

Like, ants(if I remember my biology lessons correctly) use other insects as slaves. In that relationship, ants are the masters and some other insect is the slave. Should we change biology books, because these words can be offensive when used in the context of humans? Why? Any functional adult should be able to distinguish between the two.

For other possible examples - should Montenegro change its name because negro can be offensive when used to describe humans(and even then not everywhere, it's mostly American context where it is)? Should we start renaming all islands, lakes, forests where negro is used in the name? In fact, I know that Finland is doing already this, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Really, if this whole thing is offensive to anything, then it is to human intelligence more than anything.

What you're doing here is exactly the bad faith interpretation of the concept of "offensive" that I was saying - throwing out example after example of "potentially offensive words" and how we should just throw the whole language out for fear of offending someone. This is an unfair/bad faith interpretation of what's happening here, highlighted by your insinuation that the people who care about this kind of thing have only two brain cells.

This is a watering down of the position to the point where it can be attacked by a stand up comedian saying "sorry if my jokes OFFEND YOU, snowflake!"

You're right that context matters - it'd be terribly abusive for an employer to refer to their employees as their "slaves," for example, far worse than an employer referring to "master/slave" harddrives in their documentation. That much is obvious.

So once again I'll say what's happening here: America is trying to come to terms with its history of racism against POC, the fact that it's far from a solved problem, the fact that there's a lot of work to do before justice has finally been reached. People and companies are looking for ways to help. A great thing a company can do is strive for inclusivity. Doing a little bit of auditing of internal language is fairly harmless and should be uncontroversial, but for some reason there's hordes of what I would describe as "free speech fanatics" always ready to ignore their privilege and kick down the door of public companies should they dare to try to make their POC employees actually feel like they're as valued as the white ones.

Does GitHub seeking to make their POC users and employees feel more included mean that the US government needs to pass thought crime legislation to ban the use of the word master? No. Does it mean a español dictionaries need strike the word "negro" from their lists? No.

It's a company trying to make people feel more included. That's it.

> America is trying to come to terms with its history of racism against POC

I agree, except White Americans are not actually trying to come to terms with their history of racism against POC—this is almost an exclusively non-White movement, which is why I think so many Whites are surprised/confused/whatever by the BLM protests, or GitHub's recent actions…

> except White Americans are not actually trying to come to terms with their history of racism against POC

I disagree. Tiktok is a comically shitty platform, but videos are flowing out of white kids having serious conversations with explicitly or passively racist parents. Sure, a small minority of white america, perhaps, but I don't think there's many white people left in America that aren't aware that something is happening. There were BLM protests in every state. I did a solo protest in Burlingame (absurdly full of old white people) and had tons of support from all the cars driving by and people walking around.

> which is why I think so many Whites are surprised/confused/whatever by the BLM protests

I'm not so sure - some white people are getting the shit beat out of them by the police because they turned up to a protest at the wrong time. Some are very personally starting to "get it."

> Sure, a small minority of white america, perhaps

That's literally all I was saying, so I think we agree. :)

Hah, I guess - The whole country is aware something is happening at least. Fox news made sure of it ;)

Git's use of master has nothing to do with the master/slave idea. The word master been a word longer than it has been associated with slavery. Not every use of master is offensive/rooted in slavery/racism.

> The word master been a word longer than it has been associated with slavery.

Hah, what? Slavery is as old as language, so I find this an interesting suggestion.

Edit: good points about the origin of language below. Another interesting question: if there had been more black computer scientists in early day MIT, Stanford, etc, would these terms have been adapted to the new technologies?

Latin used dominus for the master of a slave, and magister for someone who mastered or taught something.

master -> maetre (old french) -> magister latin

magister in latin, as far as I remember is the term used for the teacher (which is the same meaning in modern french, maître is how you call a teacher of primary school)

But in this case, the term "slave" isn't being used, right?

Or they can quietly allow use of 'master' as an alias until it falls out of use.

Careful, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

Github is changing the default branch name for new repos. New repos tend to have the most fresh eyes and agility. It shouldn't hurt too bad.

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

This is worth breaking the docs. They’ll be easy to fix.

Naming the default branch "master" is only a convention, not a requirement. Therefore, docs should not make any assumption about the name but give it as an example or <variable>. The deficiency here is clearly in the docs.

This. Poor choice of the original name was codified as some law, but it has never been a law and it’s time to clean up. I have seen discussions around the topic: “we have the master branch, what should we store there?” Semantics of the name were lost long time ago and it became just a random magic string in a ritual, which is not easy to explain or understand.

You said that: any example that uses "git rebase origin/master" would be broken.

Only if a project has used master as the main branch. We use "develop" for whatever reason and "master" (created by default by gitlab) hasn't updated since initial commit.

I agree that teams should be making these decisions on their own. It's just a branch name.

It will not be broken, it will be just an example for a random branch with a strange name. People which are not able to understand the abstraction and to apply it to their own repository structure, must choose another job.

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