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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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No it doesn't sound bad, words don't need to be thrown away forever just because they've been used to describe unfair treatment. I'm so sick of having to relabel so many things that are so far divorced from the social issues they are used to describe. It's so pointless and has no impact, the code doesn't care which is master and which is the slave for they are simply descriptive labels.
Are we supposed to never use the words master or slave ever again?? What's next?
My dev friends, no matter their race, all say the exact same thing. We still use master over main, come at us I guess.
It's all good and well until you start working in a repo that has both master and main branches for some reason, and it is not clear which is actually the master/main branch.
Then you're working in an idiotic repo. You could just as well have have a master and an actual_master branch. Similar idiocy.
It only takes one person to fuck it up. I agree it's stupid, but introducing a conflicting standard increases the chances of someone fucking it up in the name of progressiveness. Needless to say I killed off the main branch that someone one had tried to make to replace the master branch.
A place I used to work at had that.. The corp had rolled out a non-delete policy with something akin to
*master, so when someone made aabrv_masterbranch it got protected and couldn't be deleted anymore.I work for s company that suddenly asked to rename a lot of stuff. This had consequences. It cost time, money, and created a disconnect between internal to the dev vocabulary that couldn’t be changed easily and user facing vocabulary. Also we were lucky but this could gave broken some long used API that we are proud not to version because the policy we have internally is “we will NEVER break the API”. And for 8 years we didn’t.
This
The problem with these token activism is that it's hollow in content. The intent might be good, but the action is almost pure virtue signalling.
Slavoj Zizek pointed out in multiple interviews that there's a pervert self-reflectiveness in the self-censorship: privileged people "enjoy" being guilty of their privilege, so it's more about themselves rather than the people they claim to represent. "Sorry, but you were naive and unaware of people being racist when they use these words, so let me stop them and now you are protected (by me) in an inclusive atmosphere."
A related radical freedom situation as an inverse to the above is that when friends get really close, even using racist slurs is treated as a gesture of intimacy, rather than racism. In an ideal world, the context in the public discourse would be so strong that even racist words lose their racist meaning ("oh, so you are joking as well") rather than the opposite (assuming there's ubiquitous "hidden" racism in the use of a word, even when there's clearly none).
Another critique is that it presents itself as a substitute of real solutions. Instead of addressing real problems, it provides a simple "everyday" solution, very much similar to the recycling movement. Of course we need to recycle, but we should be aware that it's not a substitute of radical real actions (e.g. stopping the big oil).
Right? I get that langauge evolves and things go in and out of fashion, but this self-censoring for things completely unrelated to the original or derogatory meanings is kind of a pointless exercise to me.
That one is the most stupid one too, because master in git doesn't even refer to a master/slave relationship. It refers to a different meaning of the word master, namely "an original from which copies can be made", as in master recording or master key. See 5b in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And that's how it's used in git: any new branches are derived from master. Main just does not have the same nuance, because it does not imply a relationship between the branches, just that it's somehow more important than the others.
But of course, the real reason it was changed is because for companies like github it's easier to give in to the crazies who demand this than to fight them.
Is it not the main working branch? Git is a system of change not just recording change. When you start a new project, do you open a new branch or create a whole new repository? That's not rhetorical I'm genuinely curious.
No it is not. On large distributed projects for which git was designed, you typically don't directly work on main/master but you create a working branch to do your changes, and when they are ready you merge them to main/master.
There are many types of git workflows, but main/master usually contains the code that is deployed to production or the latest stable release and not some work in progress.
You have to define "project" for that.
In fact, many projects forbid pushing to master entirely and only allow reviewed merging to the master. Then, every time the master changes, a new release of the software is made (either manually or automatically with CI/CD)
Ah we develop the same way. There's testing then staging then prod is final review and is then finally merged to Main after documentation. Main branch is protected and merges are gated by review. There's no need for master terminology there.
Nobody said there is a need, you could call it foo or bar and it would still work. It just that master more accurately describes what it is. Main for example does not describe a derivative relationship, master does.
Also, master in this context is totally unrelated to slavery so I could also just as easily say that there was no need to replace the existing terminology either. It doesn't solve any real world problems of historic or currently existing slavery, and it doesn't make anyone's life better. The only reasons why it was done were appeasement and virtue signalling.
Sure, so if there's no need for any certain terminology outside of an agreed upon definition what does it matter if it's called master or main or unicorn farts? Why care about Master at all?
I've already explained all my reasons, but I'll reiterate. To summarize I basically have five main issues with it
The change was done in response to attempts at language policing and bullying by a vocal and militant minority. Giving into it is a form of appeasement towards an unreasonable demand.
The change retroactively modifies a terminology that was already agreed upon. Like, if git sprung into existence today, not many people would have an issue with it if they would call it main or trunk or primary from the get go. But that's not what happened. Git was released in 2005 and it used master terminology. As a consequence, many existing repositories also use master. Now when someone is working with branches, like doing merges or pull requests, they suddenly have to remember: oh in this repository it is main, but in that repository it is still master. Or they have go out of their way to modify decade old repositories, potentially breaking all kinds of behind the scenes CICD stuff. Or they have to go out of their way to revert the default on all systems that they're working on back to master. In any case, this change is a source of errors and wasted effort for zero net good.
It does no good in the real world other than making do-gooders feel good about themselves, and giving a capitalist entity some PR to appear more progressive than they are. We all still have masters, existing slaves are not freed, no historical wrongs of slavery or inequality are righted.
It's a misguided change in this case because the word master in this context doesn't even have a relationship to slavery. Just like a master degree you may hold, or a master key or a master recording of your favorite album have no bearing on slavery. Note that there are no "slave" branches in git.
Finally, in the case of git, master is simply more accurate than main because it carries a nuance (derivativeness) that main does not.
Take a breath dude. While I also don’t see how there is a connection to anything negative and think that older term was slightly more accurate, does it really matter?
If there’s any chance it helps maintain a hostile workplace/industry, it’s trivial to change. Might as well.
My company didn’t force a change but our git software changed their default:
Can you not please with the condescending language? Maybe you're the one who should take a breath and read my post calmly. Anyway, the guy above me asked, I gave an answer to cover all the bases.
The default branch name of git isn't that important to me either, I'll manage with main or master. But at the same time it does irk me especially since this kind of language policing has become an industry wide trend, and it's just a stupid thing done for stupid reasons. Am I still allowed to express why I find it stupid?
It isn't as trivial as you make it out. I've already encountered repos where there was both a main and a master branch, both with different commits, because some developer got confused, and it was a nice mess to untangle. But hey, let's change some more stuff around for no good reason.
I can think of a lot of things that contribute to a hostile workplace, but the default branch name of git? Seriously? Even the people who pushed for this don't actually believe that themselves.
Wait huge? Shouldn't Prod be the last place any changes go ?
In our environment Prod is only a holding area, the change/feature/bugfix is already approved for production, once the change is documented then the merge happens into main and Prod is consumed.
Our "working" branches are ephemeral.
Seems like what we use “RC” for (Release Candidate)
Yeah, we're trying to avoid a lot of hanging branches with no documentation so we try to prune as much as possible. So we built pruning and documentation into the workflow of the pipeline.
Great! The best I’ve been able to do is document a best practice to default to deleting the source branch on merge. I actually just now finished writing a script to list all repos with various details including the setting about deleting source branches on merge. I’ll talk to a few teams about it, then see if I can get management approval to set it for all repos (you can click to override in the merge request so it seems harmless)
you don't work on main/master, you make a branch to work in, and then merge your changes back into master/main
Respectfully, I can do whatever the fuck I want. That's the point of git. If I want to branch my way down to a stack overflow due to running out of free memory my system will very happily let me do that.
I'm a dev, and I'm the opposite. At my work, we use main over master. I thought it was a little silly when we first switched, but now I'm used to it. It's an arbitrary label anyway -- could easily use trunk/branch from SVN or release/develop or any number of other labels to keep track of code.
Hell, we got a new dev on the team a month or two ago, and he tends to name things 'feat/do-the-thing' instead of 'feature/make-it-go'.
It's not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.
No one told you to throw away anything. If it works for you then go wild. No one else cares what you do in private or a with your "dev friends".
I for one love shorts words to get meaning across. "main" was just sweet, the social issue thing was a good to have.
We're talking about slavery here.
It's not that hard....to be accommodating.
from your point of view
You're right. Call it a controller and agent. I know naming is hard, but we're smart enough to apply our lexicon.
Ah, the slippery slope fallacy.
The default for new repositories on GitHub has been main for awhile now. You would have had to put in effort to change it to something else. You're a stick in the mud.
The default for git repositories is still master. Not to be the "real programmers only use CLI" guy, but I feel like
git initisn't too hipster....which you get a multiline message telling you to change your ways (Linus doesn't break UX)....every time you init....weird.
Gonna be honest, I don't think I ever read that. I think I usually just do
git statusimmediately after to see if all's well.The default has been main for awhile.
March 2021 for gitlab
Still the default in git.
...but recommended to be changed every. single. time. you git init. https://lemmy.world/comment/11895670
can you point where ANYTHING is recommended at all there?
Cause it simply says that you can change the name. But "master" is the default. That doesn't sound like a "recommendation" at all. But just making people aware since some repositories try to force things like "Main". Almost like the repo you're using might be enforcing shit that Git in of itself doesn't give a shit about.
"I'm going to be annoying you until you do something about it" It is recommending that you take some sort of action, that choice is up to you as the user. In fact, the older way of disabling the warning was called
advice.defaultBranchNameAFAIK git is still Linus Trovalds' project and one thing he is known for is "you dont fuckin break user space". That is acknowledged in the pull request https://github.com/git/git/pull/921
Linus is also a fuck-your-feelings kind of guy so deprecation_period == linus_date_of_death. No, I'm not implying Linus is racist/bigot, just that he feels that strongly about breaking user experience.
You're right...and that's why its unbelievable to me how some people are still (it has been nearly 4 years since that PR above) resistant to change this one little thing. This is just the initial branch that we're talking about here. Git doesn't care if you:
You call that annoying? Annoying would be not functioning at all unless you choose an choice... or even worse. Go the Github route and specifically force you to use anything other than master.
Right... So why are you attributing Github = Git... When It's clear that's not the case.
Github != git.
No shit? Let me guess; you're still using git like Linus intended it to be, decentralized, by emailing each other tar.gz's
No. I'm just not willing to attribute a COMPANY as the sole owner/stakeholder in a protocol that honestly has very little to do with them.
Just because Github does something, doesn't mean that they represent git.
I just used the most popular/known example. Personally I haven't liked GitHub since Micro$oft bought them. I'm ol' school, 25 years in the biz so M$ really really leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth.
I'll answer your other question in the other thread.
Fuck I don't get your downvotes, you're right. I get people want to vent but in the greater scheme of things having to use different words to be a smidge more inclusive isn't that big of a deal or effort considering what some of us do to help our friends be accepted.
It's so weird that so many people are calling being accommodating in such a small way "performative" or whatever! I think some people just can't handle change and blame others for it.
or it's just literally performative and doesn't actually change anything about the realities of being POC in America other than making (ironically) a bunch of white people feel good about themselves.
Okay then, I'm being performative. I feel better about myself, thanks.
We're talking about slavery here.
It's not that hard....to be accommodating.
from your point of view
You're right. Call it a controller and agent. I know naming is hard, but we're smart enough to apply our lexicon.
Ah, the slippery slope fallacy.
The default for repositories on GitHub has been main. You would have had to put in effort to change it to something else. You're a stick in the mud.