Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobjordan | Hacker News Reader

I use `master` in all my repos because I've been using it since forever and it never has once occurred to me "oh shit I better change it to `main` this time in case `master` may offend somebody some day. Unfortunately, that's the last thing on my mind when I'm in programming mode. Now that everything is `master`, maybe it is just a simple git command to change it to `main`. But, my fear is it'll subtly break something and I just don't have enough hours left in my life to accept yet unknown risk that it'll cost me even more hours, just to make some random sensitive developer not get offended one day.

View on HN

Also, git's "master" branch is named after a master recording or master copy, the canonical original from which duplicates are made. There is literally no reason for it be offensive except for those who retroactively associate the word with slavery.

I'll change my default branches to main when Masterclass change their name to Mainclass

And mastering a subject is changed to maining it?

Yeah, with replica it made a little sense. Was still silly, but at least the official master/slave terminology actually didn't fully make sense either... So the replica rebrand felt justified to me.

With git it was basically entirely driven by SJW that felt empowered by people accepting the replica rebrand

imo the `main` thing was mostly driven by people trying to appease the social justice crowd without understanding much about the movement. Its a bit of woo in my mind because there are still systemic injustices out there that are left uncontested, and using main doesn't really contest anything substantial.

I don't really care what the default branch is called tho so I'm willing to play along.

Nope, the term comes from bitkeeper which does refer to master/slave.

See this email for some references:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

I'm fully on-board with not using master-slave terminology. I work in the embedded space where those terms were and still are frequently used, and I support not using them any more. But I've been using git pretty much since it was released and I've never heard anyone refer to a "slave repo" or "slave branch". It's always been local repo, local branch, etc. I fully believe these sorts of digital hermeneutics (e.g. using a 26-year-old mailing list post to "prove" something, when actual usage is completely different) drive division and strife, all because some people want to use it to acquire status/prestige.

I would have thought someone of such extensive life experience would be more comfortable with the uncovering of an unknown than to characterize it as "driving division and strife". It is undestandable to have a chip on your shoulder in the face of the ageism rooted within the tech industry, but my "digital hermaneutics" is simply a fact and not an attempt at toppling your "stats/prestige" of being a day-1 git user, there is no need to be defensive about it.

Does git use "slave?"

Then does simply performing a search on bitkeepers documents for "slave" then automatically imply any particular terminology "came from bitkeeper?"

Did they take it from bitkeeper because they prefer antiquated chattel slavery terminology? Is there any actual documents that show this /intention/?

Or did they take it because "master" without slave is easily recognizable as described above which accurately describes how it's _actually_ implemented in git.

Further git is distributed. Bitkeeper was not.

This is just time wasting silliness.

Does asking rhetorical questions count as effective argumentation?

If I do enough sealioning will my unsupported thesis be belived?

What about imposing my modern perspective into a chain of historical events to prove my own perspective?

Further, I'm going to use technical jargon to get around Occam's razor.

You seem very serious about this, I think wasting time on something silly could be good for you.

At Meta, when this mass push for the rename happened across the industry, a few people spent nearly the full year just shepherding the renaming of master to main, and white box/black box to allowlist/blocklist.

This let them claim huge diff counts and major contributions to DEI and get promos.

They measure LoC contributions at FB?

Same at my org at the time, blacklist was nixed, no matter how many times the question, "What color is ink on a page?" was brought up.

> What color is ink on a page?

Middle gray, according to modern UX designers. ;)

You are lucky. It's often light gray on thin fonts.

The colour of the ink is not where "blacklist" comes from though? It's not from supposed skin colour either...

Blocklist makes more sense in most scenarios.

Seems like a bad faith question, unfortunate that it was asked multiple times. Blacklist is derived from a definition where black means "evil, bad, or undesirable". When you say that ink is black, you're using a different definition, which relates to color. I don't know if I see the objection to blackbox, which uses a definition of "unknown". Personally, I think the harm is small but I look to people of color for guidance and prefer the more descriptive deny-list where I can. Cuts down on possible confusion for non-native English speakers too.

The irony is that the term "Black" was precisely chosen by Black civil rights activists in the 1960s. This wasn't a term given by white people, it was specifically chosen by Blacks, because of its negative connotations. They wanted to embrace its negative connotations and turn it on its head, and that's where terms like "Black is beautiful" came from. They didn't want to be ashamed of it, that's why they embraced it. Black was not a term of shame, it was a term of power.

Now, the left wing activists have turned it on its head again, and now saying that the term "black" is shameful and racist. It's bizarre how ignorant people are who say the term "blacklist" is racist.

I think you've constructed a strawman. Can you point to evidence that people think the word black is shameful and racist?

Or maybe you are confusing the idea that 'using black to mean bad and white to mean good' is a problem?

Those are two different concepts.

Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.

I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.

A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.

I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.

This is why diffs / LoC is a terrible metric. It shows nothing other than a willingness to push large changesets upstream.

In current times, there will be more people offended that some prefer to use "main" rather than "master", than people that will be offended if "master" is used

Haven't got enough hours to type fewer characters, but have got plenty of time to go karma-fishing about it on an almost barely tangentially relevant HN thread. Cool.

Im just tuning out of the whole master vs main discussion. I use whatever is the default branch name of my current project OR what git init gives me. When / if git init produces a default branch named main, i'll use that.

Thank you for creating the containment thread.

not on your mind, yet you found the time to write this comment

are you sure this is about time/breaking and not "being told how to think"?

> But, my fear is it'll subtly break something and I just don't have enough hours left in my life to accept yet unknown risk that it'll cost me even more hours,

Yeah, it's not like 99% of the world has already switched from master to main already (without any major problems) ...

You'll find CI/CD automation probably needs to be updated. (Triggering different actions when merges to the default branch happen, or perhaps just deployments.)

These are the kinda local things that the parent was probably referring to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com