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Comment by matt-attack | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.

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.

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In Microsoft v. AT&T, decision 550 US 437 (2007), there was discussion about a golden disk, and the terminology changed to master disk during the course of the proceedings, because the disk wasn’t actually made of gold.

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...>

what, the golden ratio is not made of gold? have we been betrayed all this time?

Wait until you hear about showers

you mean, like baby showers? yeah, totally not what i expected...

The golden rule would deform pretty quickly be useless for measurement.

This stuff reminds me of what my mother said about feminists trying to get people to spell women with a y. She didn't like it because it made feminism seem like something petty and frivolous.

If I put my tin foil hat on it feels like a psyops to make the left look like a bunch of morons.

Yeah, I mean, isn’t a masters degree even worse, then?

a masters degree is about mastery, not about being central/main/leading...

Masters degree is from “magister”, meaning director/chief/boss/leader

wikipedia says: The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone who had been admitted to the rank (degree) of master (i.e. teacher)

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.

Magister means teacher and the things I mentioned. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister#Latin

Now I just know why I couldn't get a job. It's because I got a bad and worse degree for two years

That "waste" of resources was absolutely tiny. Took me just some minutes. And I didn't do it because of DEI, just because I think it's a better name.

Same for me, but kind of because of DEI. Basically, it offended some people, and even if I thought it was a little overblown, it took about 2 minutes to change the default name of future repos to be something else (which was at least as good, and perhaps better). It made some people happier at approximately zero cost to myself, so why not.

Yeah that’s how I feel about most progressive stuff - sure it might not bother me, but also changing doesn’t bother me either. It costs you so little to accommodate other people.

I used to feel that way up until about a year ago. At worst I would roll my eyes at the silliness and then move on, because this stuff rarely matters much one way or another.

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.

I’d like to see a study showing 1) people aware of this issue and 2) for whom it swung their vote to the right. That’d have to be, what, 10 complete idiots? “Well, I was going to vote for A, but some of B’s supporters asked if I would please be considerate, and that’s a bridge too far.”

I don’t think it’s true that the culture war issues themselves were the cause of those swayed votes so much as there’s a propaganda machine running 24/7 stoking those resentments and using such cultural critique as fodder.

This works really well to whip people into an othering frenzy to distract them from voting for their own economic interests.

Oh, sure, it was people asking for branch renaming.

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.

Sorry it was exit polls that convinced you not to care about other people so much?

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.”

Progressive ideology tends to treat moral progress as inevitable, while pursuing social transformation in ways that can undermine the very institutions and norms that make progress possible.

Making "some people" happier isn't zero cost if the people in question are intolerant lunatics with ideas corrosive to the social fabric. It's one reason why the pendulum is swinging fiercely in the other direction.

TIL "I'm uncomfortable calling it master-slave, can we do main-replica?" is the idea of an "intolerant lunatic" that is "corrosive to the social fabric".

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.

This is why I left California and utterly done with you people.

I live over 1,000 miles from California, bud.

I have encountered at least two bugs due to the change in names.

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.

I dont know, for me main makes more sense so I prefer main. The main branch isn't master of anything, but its the main branch.

> The main branch isn't master of anything

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

Yah, they are losing something with the name change that they don't even understand because they apparently don't understand the intricacies of English. We would be better off changing it to "Gucci Mane" then we could tag our branches off Gucci's hit singles.It only makes slightly less sense than switching to "main"

That would make perfect sense if all branches had to be made from the default branch.

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?

> 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.

Nobody is telling you what not to name your branches.

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 is telling you what not to name your branches.

> 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.

> how word "master" is actually not an unreasonable choice in this context.

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?

> 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.

So what's your point?

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 am doing exactly as you say.

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.

But git is a distributed VCS system - there is no master copy. But there certainly is a main branch, which may have many copies on many machines.

I actually worked in film audio engineering and Master is not the universally used term and hasn't been used uniformly throughout history. I have an analog Mackie mixer from the 2000s with "Main" as the name of the Main Bus that was designed before the whole debate took part.

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.

Makes sense when you release 3.0 and basically allowed to introduce breaking changes.

In tech field there's lots of people living on the very fringes of society, hidden away behind keyboard.

Every time I push to master I get this song in my head

  Master! Master!

Every time I push to main I have in my head:

  ...meh

Master of Puppets -- Metallica

To be fair, the song is about control and the abuse of power.

I heard that it's about drugs controlling you

you can call your branch whatever name you want. nobody cares, nobody is stopping you.

That was true before the 3.0 release. Why didn't the people offended by "master" just change the branch name? Because it was never about their own branch names. It was about everyone else's.

> Maybe they resisted because it was completely ridiculous waste of engineering resources all over the country and for absolutely no tangible reason other than white people trying to feel better about themselves.

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.

That "waste of resources" is completely made up, this changes nothing for any existing repo what so ever. Any existing repo that updated did so completely voluntarily, no tool forced them to.

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.

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