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.
In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.
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.
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.
But then the 2024 elections happened, along with a bunch of exit polls, voter interviews, and other data showing that a surprising (to me anyway) number of people hate this kind of virtue signalling to the point that it can sway their vote. It's very possible those swung votes have ushered in a host of harmful changes that I think do matter a great deal. So now I'm sick of this stuff, it's not only a waste of time it's actively harmful.
This works really well to whip people into an othering frenzy to distract them from voting for their own economic interests.
It wasn't the multiple dedicated Neo-Nazi propaganda networks that call all minorities and immigrants and political opponents enemies of the state.
It wasn't the election of politicians that are actual, convicted rapists and felons who distract by pointing to those who can't fight back.
Don’t fool yourself kiddo, you were always an asshole, you were just waiting for the right excuse, just like the rest of us.
The deal with progressive ideology is that it progresses. Fixing inequality, prejudice, and injustice are a lifelong project, because as fast as you address issues, bigots will create new things to be bullies about. You don’t get to just get off at some point and be like “oh okay things seem good enough now.”
Good Lord, just listen to yourself.
Red-lined districts still shape America to this day and several red states have been rampant on racial districting to screw minority communities. You can't even pretend the history of slavery is in the past in America.
Everything considered I invested an hour or more in total. I am pretty sure decades of engineering time and resources were invested over the years because some people didn't like a default globally used for decades.
Master! Master!
...mehTo be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.
If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.
and
from Latin: magister, "teacher"
teaching requires mastery, not leadership, although the concepts are related because mastery is also good for leadership.
my armchair etymology suggests that master and mastery were closely related until it started to be applied to leadership as well.
I remember that Justice Antonin Scalia objected: “I hope we can continue calling it the golden disk. It has a certain Scheherazade quality that really adds a lot of interest to this case.”
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...>
I think the resisting probably wasted more time than anything else.
We used the occasion to ensure that there was no hardcoded naming in our IaC, internal tooling and CI/CD. It was surprinsingly easy, gave us a great excuse to do some much needed clean up and now everything can work with any branch used as the main one.
Was it extremely important? Probably not. Was it worth fighting against/having a stong opinion about? Probably not either.
Sometimes, it's easier to just go with the flow and try to turn things which seem meaningless into actual improvements. If it makes the people who think it's not meaningless feel better, well, even better. It surely didn't cost me much.
It's master as in "master copy":
A "master copy" is an original version of a work from which other copies are made, serving as the definitive or controlling version
But they don't.
At `$CLIENT` we use `stable` as the default branch.
Use whatever works for you. Getting upset about a default that you can change is like getting upset about the default wallpaper of your OS.
And before you get all persnickety about that argument working both ways: the developers of git, get to decide the defaults and they did.
If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right?
No idea how you got that impression from my comment. It sounds like you're the one that's upset.
I don't care what you name your branches. I do think it's dumb to tell other people what (not) to name their branch though. But definitely not something I feel compelled to rearrange my life over.
The people that wrote the software you're using for free, decided to change the default name.
That's it. Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
This is reductionist. The git people didn't pull this idea out of their butt. It came about because a lot of people were saying that we should not name our branches master.
I have no problem with what the git people did. Easy enough for them to change it, and it puts a dumb issue to bed (for them).
But I think it's fair for anyone to point out that the motivation was dumb, and to explain why it's dumb and how the word "master" is actually not an unreasonable choice in this context.
> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.
Sure, until somebody makes the mistake of not renaming all of their old "master" branches and gets shamed by the word police over it.
Of course you're welcome to disagree.
It doesn't even make sense in this context though. The name just got copied from BitKeeper which had master and slave branches.
Git doesn't have that concept.
> Sure, until somebody makes the mistake of not renaming all of their old "master" branches and gets shamed by the word police over it.
How are you going to be shamed? I thought there's nothing wrong with it?
If you re-read my comments you will understand that I don't believe there's anything wrong with using the word "master" to name a branch. But other people do, which is why there was an uproar and the default name was ultimately changed to "main".
Not sure how you were able to misinterpret this.
If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, why would you care if someone else says "hey change this".
Do the same thing you'd do if someone says "hey you should use mongodb it's web scale": tell them you disagree and won't be doing that.
If you don't think there's anything wrong with it, how can you be "shamed" into doing something you disagree with?
I made a comment saying I disagree with the word police and I think it's dumb to cast people as being insensitive for using a longstanding word that makes sense to many people in the context it's used in.
[init]
defaultBranch = master
I also think "main" is a stupid word that doesn't say much about anything. I even hate "main" functions.
int main(int argc, char **argv);
Freestanding C gets rid of the libc so that's not a problem.
I submitted an issue to the GCC bugzilla about renaming certain symbols generated by compiler.
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113694
I don't know how to implement it and nobody else cared enough to.
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.
git config --global init.defaultBranch masterMost people do not care and will stick with the old default on old projects and use the new default on new projects. Occasionally, it stokes conversations around possible third options that are more descriptive like stable or development, but the norm is to just go with the default.
Going out of your way to set the default to the old name really reeks to me of slacktivism. People probably think that they're taking a stand, but in actual fact others will just assume that your repository is older or that you have an old configuration.
Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway
Glad it's going back to having a default and not asking.