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Comment by throwaheyy | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I understand the idea of banning words being taken so far. I always interpreted Git’s usage of ‘master’ to mean the original replica. Like the golden master of a record or CD.

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Not only this, but the idea that we should focus our efforts on these utter non-problems (no one has ever been harmed or disenfranchised in any way by the use of this term) as opposed to any of the very real problems our society faces (environment, growing inequality, etc) is itself a real problem. And the people who are meant to be the "victims" of these issues almost never take offense or issue (e.g., Japanese opinions on the little girl's geisha-themed party or Chinese opinions on the traditional-Chinese themed prom dress, or African American opinions on defunding the police, or etc). The people who take offense are very often not even members of these "victim groups", but rather people who believe race is the preeminently useful characteristic of any person and that races have agency and collective guilt/accomplishment and so on (i.e., "racism" in a literal, classical sense).

To me this point never makes much sense, do you really believe that a change as small as a naming convention switch means that we can't focus on real problems? It doesn't make sense and is a non-sequitur argument

At a minimum you should be considering organizational change fatigue. It takes expenditure of political capital to enact these changes even if you don’t see it right away. Spending it on this does mean you’re less able to spend it on others. So asking “is this the most important thing to spend that capital on?” doesn’t seem like a bad question. Additionally, if someone perceives you as being wasteful in how you choose to spend that capital they may be even more resistant in the future to changes that are far less cosmetic.

> a change as small as a naming convention

This "small" change had to be split into 29 parts, so that each part stays below 100kB. This means nearly 3MB of changed code. How many hours did developers have to spend to consider what needs to be changed, make the change and then validate it? In my opinion these are hours wasted, that could be better spent on some real problems.

The post says it was a single global search/replace (probably a grep) operation, plus some automated merge checks. Because most of what was most affected was literally test scripts, almost all of it sounds like it was automated and the vast majority of the "hours wasted" weren't person hours but machine hours.

The reviewer still needs to read it one by one if he decides to adopt it. And it is likely to be many hours.

Nobody banned anything. They changed a default.

Git was developed to replace Bitkeeper. Git's usage of master probably comes from Bitkeeper's usage of master and slave.

Ok, that’s maybe a bit different.

No, the guy who picked the name "master", Petr Baudis, explained why he picked it:

> "master" as in e.g. "master recording".

https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441

I hadn't seen that. Thanks!

He also said "it's not unlikely at all" it was influenced by Bitkeeper[1] and he's "wished many times" he picked main instead[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272958618124595201

[2] https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577

this has been explained further again and again

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