Strange movement against the Git “master” branch

[Wuzzy]

There is currently a weird movement going on in the Git universe, and it appears to me it is being lead by Microsoft-owned proprietary GitHub: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53050955
Or at least GitHub wants to be perceived as the “leaders”.

Apparently some people seriously want to abandon the current name of the default branch in Git, “master”. They haven't really agreed on a different word, but strong suggestons seem to be “main”, “mainline”, “primary” or “develop”.

They claim that the term “master”, as used in Git, comes from slavery, and is therefore bad.

I strongly disagree with this rationale. First, I'm not convinced of the “evidence” that was presented so far. First, the word “master” has multiple meanings (as so often in English). But the main reason I don't buy it is that while there is a “master”, I haven't seen any meaning of the word “slave” in Git so far. But even if it really was a reference to a “master/slave”, this is still a pretty bad reason. It's just a metaphor.
It should go without saying: But I really am 100% against slavery. There, I said it. That's pretty much the default position nowadays. Why people feel the need to emphasize that is beyond me …

Personally, I think this movement is pretty silly and people who take part in this strange movement are just shooting themselves in the foot. There are many other issues in FOSS that are actually valid and are way more important than that. For example, that so many FOSSes have made themselves dependent on proprietary software like Discord for their communication. This is a much bigger problem IMO.

If this name change would be “cheap”, i.e. with no migration pains, I probably would not mind that much. I have no problem with the other suggested words. But Git is now a mature system. A potential name change seems to be quite painful. You'd have to inform your devs, as their master branches will stop working. You'd have to update documentation, a lot of Git-related documentation relies on the fact that “master” is the default branch (so these docs would “break” as well). Then, I know that definitely only a fraction of Git repositories will follow suit, and some just stay at “master”. That's a huge mess. This does not sound fun at all.

What also worries me a lot is that staff of proprietary GitHub itselfs totally sees themselves as the leader of this transition:

For what it’s worth, I’m *super* happy to rename the default branch structure of “master” to “main” and I hope we can all do this together as a community with @github leading the charge by implementing in their product moving forward

https://mobile.twitter.com/Una/status/1 ... 4944829441

Tbh, I don't give a damn about what staff of proprietary GitHub has to say. They're NOT part of the FOSS movement. But I think it's pretty hilarious they see themselves as the leaders of a movement … And it's telling that they see GitHub as just a product, not as a community. They don't care about the community, they only care about themselves. (Okay, this should not be a surprise to anybody, they're a company, after all.) Frankly, they can fuck right off!

Also, currently, it does not look like as if Git itself is going to budge, but I might be wrong. Would be pretty hilarious if Git is keeping “master” as default, and GitHub doesn't. This is going to be !!!FUN!!!

To me, this complete movement is based on irrationality and virtue-signalling more than anything else.

[Julius]

Well, Linux and the creator of git are also changing it, so I think this will become the new standard.

Personally I don't think it is a big deal and quite "cheap" to change... about the matter itself: "master" as a term carries no meaning that would make it better than other proposed options. It is literally just a convention and one that wasn't thought out very well I guess. Some might say it is a slippery slope, but I disagree. This is a super easy concession to make and no one has any disadvantage due to it after the changes are done.

[GunChleoc]

I always though of it as master vs journeyman/assistant/companion, as in "master joiner" - somebody who is better at their craft than others. This totally makes sense, since the code quality in master is usually higher than in a work in progress branch.

Oh and by the way, I have a master's degree from a university. Do I need to rename that too now?

As to the debate, I'd say it's a case of molehill => mountain. Whoever screams the loudest about being "offended" wins.

You can actually configure the base branch of your repo, and I'll be leaving it as it is.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.

[Jastiv]

I've decided to start moving my projects away from the idea of a "master" branch. I think people probably haven't taken full advantage of all the features of git, because they are afraid of its power (that is, the power of git.) the calling something a "master" branch is apparently some terminology leftover from when Torvolds used bitkeeper and wanted to move some of the good ideas to open source where everyone would use it, free software zealots and people would don't care about software ideology alike.

I think the whole idea of "branching" has left a bad taste in some people's mouths because they got so used to crap like cvs or subversion, with the big old centralized repository. Also, after my sourceforge got defaced with a bad commit (honestly, it looks like a commit from a bot) that deleted most things in the latest version, I decided I had better be "redundant" with the code. I would encourage people to clone and download my wograld repository. (I still haven't figured out how to get rid of the master branch on sourceforge yet, but I will, so I suggest using the gitlab or github one for now)

Part of the problem is the idea of a big old centralized "maintainer" and you are either "on" the project or "off" of it. Projects seem like too much of a commitment, like you have to spend your life on some software you barely care about, and maybe just played with for a few hours. I think people don't want to be roped into software that no one uses spending hours upon hours on it only for the project to just get completely abandoned by users. So when you say "master" branch, maybe it is the maintainer who is a slave to old school ideas about project management from ten to fifteen years ago.

[Wuzzy]

Personally I don't think it is a big deal

As I said, it is not the change itself that bothers me, but more the rationale behind it. To me it's just a virtue signal of the highest order and I think it kinda makes the FOSS movement look a little crazy to outsiders.

I mean, "black-box testing" of George Floyd by US police started this whole thing.

Now you got me very confused. Is “black-box testing” some strange conservative / racist / white supremacist dog whistle? If so, in what text was it used in a racist connotation? Unironically, I want to know. Or did you want to say something else?

The only meaning I know of “black-box testing” is from software development. It's when you are testing a feature of a software just by using it like a normal use, i.e. without looking inside the code or internal data. It is called “black-box testing” because it is a metaphor. It's a metaphor because the thing you are testing is metaphorically inside a little box that is literally painted in the color black. In other words, you can't see inside.
There is also “white-box testing” which is when you are also allowed to analyze the code and other internal stuff, i.e. look inside the box. This term is a little silly because a white box is still opaque so there's also the alternative term “glass-box testing”.

In any way, neither “black-box testing” nor “white-box testing” have anything to do with race, at least in software development. And I also do not see how you can connect the racist murder of George Floyd by US police (or the term “black-box testing”) to Git branch names.

I also don't believe that it was actually this murder that “started this whole thing”. I can also recall a controversy about the terms “master” and “slave” as used in networking, before the murder.

By the way, the fallout of the “master/slave” controversy is especially amusing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)#Terminology_concerns

Because “master/slave” was politically incorrect, many projects have adopted different terms, but it's now a complete word chaos, with many different terms for the same things. Now the “master” could be one of: “master”. “primary”, “source”, “provider”, “controller”, “initiator”, ... All the words mean the exact same thing. And it's similar for “slave”. Uggghh. Nonsense like this is what annoys me to no end.

[drummyfish]

Renaming something and the cost of that is completely irrelevevant, I am concerned about the precedents these idiots are setting. This is not normal, we can't be banning words based on extremely loose associations with whatever. It's all like from the most typical dystopian horror story and people are remaining pretty calm about this. Is no one else seeing the dangers here? I mean by now I am basically giving up on explaining this over and over, no one is listening, everyone is just concerned with immediate consequences and not thinking about principles and further future. I don't want to live in this society.

[Julius]

Who is banning words?

All I see a group of people that reflected on the origin of certain phrases used in their own infrastructure and jointly decided to use different terms from now on.

[drummyfish]

Well that's how it starts, that's how every oppressive law ever started. Brain has to be used here to extrapolate further.

I predict this will lead to wordrights, something akin copyright but even more fucked up.

So these guys refuse to use the word "master", okay no big deal, then other groups join in until a majority of the population accepts that this word shouldn't be used, probably a few statues should be destroyed in the process, then the few that want to use the word "master" have to either accept this or start their own state or perhaps planet -- I wonder which one they'll choose. Now come other minority groups that want to do the similar with other words, e.g. someone will de-facto ban the word "disable", "black box" etc., until we have a list of words that if you use others will start a hostile behavior towards you, even if it's not an official state law yet. This will create more work places for people like word-checkers, word inventors, COC writers, great. Then this idea of blacklisting words on the internet gets a bit further with minorities such as people suffering from anxiety slowly demoralizing words that can trigger anxiety such as the word "conflict": there's no real alternative words to you, they simply politely ask you don't talk about any conflicts and don't use that words if you can or at least have some rules -- I mean if you're nice to one minority you cannot refuse to be nice to another minority -- so SJWs accept this, then after a few years this politeness is gone and the word "conflict" is downright banned, only Nazis use it, also it has now made it to the legislation and it's illegal to use words from a government approved list in ways they're not allowed to be used. Of course this happens slowly, firstly there's only few very extremist terms on that list such as "heil Hitler" etc., then more and more words sneak in, one more can never hurt, right? So now for example the word "nigger" can only be used by someone who's skin is darker than some specified RGB value and the anxiety-inducing word "kill" can only be used by news reporting organization but only after a 10 second fullscreen trigger warning, after which they also have to apologize. Words like "communism" and "socialism" are of course also de-facto banned because in hard capitalist society these induce anxiety in most people: the words can only be used with permission and only to criticize communism and socialism.

Every inter-human communication now looks like the soulless sterile PR communication you see on twitter accounts of businesses.

Yeah sure you think this is going too far. Your children will not see it so unrealistic, their children will think it's only half crazy and their children will say "it's not a perfect system but it's the best we have".

So in a few centuries here we have wordrights that "protects" us, yay and by the way it serves as an excuse to monitor absolutely every word you ever say or write anywhere, because you know, only terrorists and fascists want to use bad words, public domain has been destroyed -- not by copyright because that couldn't be extended further, but by this new, very convenient wordright: states controls every work that contains non-neutral words (i.e. every book) -- it will indeed serve as an excuse to burn old books that happen to be uncomfortable for the regime, to cancel organizations and individuals such as you who are a bad boy and criticizes the state or rather the world's ruling corporation.

Sounds totally fun.

INB4 someone goes HAHA BUT THIS CANT HAPEN IN THE NEXT 3 YRS SO UR STUPID. Yes, I am most likely stupid, but then what are you?

[Julius]

Why do you care about what might happen in a few centuries? It is a futile exercise to speculate about that and in 99% of the cases your prediction will be wrong anyways.

Also language has always been fluid and is shaped by the majority consensus. If that consensus changes, so does the language. Just deal with this fact and move on. No need to spin up some conspiracy theories about far future possible developments.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.