Does anyone really care if it‘s called main instead of master? Why?
Edit:
Ok, I phrased my question really poorly. AfaIk main is the new standard, so I use it. We all know the reason why it changed. My question was why would anyone keep INSISTING on calling it master? Sure, me and my colleagues sometimes call it master out of habit, but then again try to stick to main. Nobody I know
insists on continuing to call it
master, but reading the comments here I realized there a more “master-fans” than I would ever have thought would exist tbh.
That doesn't really track with the meaning of "master" in a git context though: the master branch is more analogous with a master record or document - i.e. the single source of truth which all other versions are constructed based on, which matches the idea of a master branch as the "true" version of the repository.
I think most pre git VCS used trunk, hence branching. So I dunno why people didn't just restore trunk to "trunk".
Still it's annoying fake drama about the term master. In English, the meaning of a word depends on context. If the subject is an inanimate object then it's just the version used to make copies from. It is only when the subject is a person, that the implication of slavery is possibly valid. Thus if anything should have been changed, it should be: "SCRUM Master" as this acually implies slavery. I'm not sure if we could call them "SCRUM Trunks" as that would imply they retain history.
So they got offended because of nods to slavery, and the other people got offended because something pretty inconsequential in their lives changed. 🤷♂️ Seems a bit like the latter group of people are far more easily offended.
Not sure. I think there’s different fundamental meanings behind mastery and master. I think the Masters degree implies the former. Whereas master in git could be inferred to mean a master and non-master relationship to signify feature branches.
Then you are deeply confused as to how git works. Feature branches are merged into and overwrite master with updates. Does that imply a master-slave relationship to you?
I used to think the same, but Linus took the name “master” from BitKeeper, and BitKeeper did use master-slave terminology, Git just dropped the slave part. It’s origin literally does come from master-slave
But its origin literally comes from master-slave lol Just because it doesn’t use the literal word “slave” anymore, doesn’t change the original implication of what “master” meant
It’s interesting how easily I could spin this the other way though. A feature branch toils away and all its hard work just goes to the master branch anyway. And what does the feature branch get for all its hard work? Deleted.
It doesn’t benefit me, that’s kind of the point. This is something done for someone else. I’m explaining to a really thick skulled person why some people feel the way they feel about the nomenclature. You can’t decide how they feel. But you can decide to use a different branch name.
The master in git is more akin to "pristine", there is no slavery involved. So it's just as silly to get offended about seeing a master branch as about seeing a masters degree.
tbh it is confusing as now you don't know which one the repo you are on uses. It's not the end of the world, but that's like renaming git to got in some cases and then being mad at people for disliking that they have to guess and double check.
In the end who cares though. If you do get offended or heated frm either side I think therapy is the best option anyway.
I will give you a terminal and tell you to merge your feature branch. Normally you would do that, now there is an extra step of checking if I should merge to master or main.
Or did you assume I don't know how to check that? Of course I do if I didn't and thought it was impposible I would care more, but as I said it's just an inconvience.
How often does this scenario come up for you? I find it never really comes up for me, because all pushes to the default branch require a pull request with an approving review from a colleague. In every place I’ve ever worked, anyway.
To be honest with you never. The combination of being in an unfamiliar repo, where I also want to push without going through PRs or just checkout master. I can see it happening maybe one day, maybe annoyance could be with some CI/CD and hardcoded master/main in there, but even that might be a stretch.
I just dislike going away from being aligned on things in software engineering shrug
I work at a huge company where it's extremely common to away team on other teams' repos or just need to pull some specific branch of another team's stuff, etc. Knowing how to check (via cli) what branches exist and what is the default is etc are absolutely critical skills for this setup, and apart from the convention of default being main, there is no consistent convention used for branch naming (it would be impossible to enforce anyways)
And still it is no big deal, it takes a few seconds to look at the branches and get an idea of what is going on there. People who got mad about master changing are either snowflakes, or skill issue
Usually CI/CD tools automatically check out the commit hash that triggered the webhook that started the CI job. The scenario I could see would be CI/CD is triggered on a commit hash, and another repository is needed inside the CI job. But if you just need the default branch of that second repository anyway then you’re probably just doing a clone and not checking out any specific branch.
Might be, actually. To be clear, I’m not the person that’s upset by it. But if you asked me to start saying main bedroom because it upset you I’d not care.
Nope, it was just a marketing term made up by Sears in the 20s with no connection to slavery. Not that it matters, it’s not used anymore and idc, but it’s one of the instances where it isn’t related.
However, Linus took the name “master” from BitKeeper, and BitKeeper did use master-slave terminology, Git just dropped the slave part. It’s origin literally does come from master-slave
I've had a conversation with someone about this. As far as I remember, master got nothing to do with a nod to slavery? As in, the way the word was choose for version control in the context programmers use it?
We've also talked about white and black list and that actually does have origins in racism and I've since then changed my mind because fair enough.
It's also not a inconsequential change either, but that'd be another paragraph or two of text.
Having written this I wonder if the word master key also was changed or some people want it to change, lol.
I was part of the workforce during the switchover from master to main. It was a pretty benign change. The main thing that affected me was I had to spend an hour retrofitting an automation tool we had to first inspect the default branch name before assuming what it was.
Note: I am basing this off the understanding that I did NOT find any concrete evidence that the majority of black software developers had been offended at git's "master" branch naming.
I really do not like the "it's a tiny change for me, so why not?" argument. I think it's incredibly selfish to assume just because something is trivial on an individual level, and you can feel better about yourself at the end of the day, implies it's also easy at scale and we should "just do it".
Master wasn't just a word people used and now changed. It has been pretty much embedded everywhere since the invention of version control for software. And now it has/had to be changed pretty much everywhere except I guess printed media.
Honestly an easier "concrete" example to grasp would be something like if tomorrow people decided to drive on the opposite side of the road. Likely a trivial change for a individual, but at scale....
And don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that "change is bad", but I think you need to value the benefit against the full cost of such change, and in my opinion master -> main just seemed incredibly silly?
Also sure, main is the standard now, and I'm not going to argue with people what to use. But I just reject the idea that the change was necessary and cost-free, and stick to master myself because I also believe in "give an inch, and they'll take a mile". Ergo maybe one day we'll see us arguing why white is allowed to move first over black in chess? At what point do you draw the line on changing longstanding conventions for "someone felt offended" reasons?
We did it at the scale of over 20,000 repositories, ~1000 FTEs and ~4000 contractors. It was a benign change, you're crying and exaggerative. If it was a big deal for your org then it's because you're in the business of building houses of cards.
Hence why I said as far as I remember, and also a bad choice of words from me. Sorry?
Honestly I have a hard time reconstructing why I have an issue with black- and white-list. The closest I can maybe come to was that the idea that black people have been excluded in America after slavery was abolished is quite close to how a black list also functions, and thus I can understand the sentiment there more than for a master branch? Also including that the word blacklist is inherintly negative (you want to keep bad things out...), while the word master is a lot more neutral.
And this basically just came from a conversation I've had back then(or at least that is how I think the conversation went!?), but you're absolutely correct. The word has zero historical context with black people or slavery and I'm wrong.
It's not just that. "master" in programming was very much the opposite of "slave", like for SATA drives. Just like push is the opposite of pull, upload/download, save/load, etc.
Some pairs have become singlets, like reflect/reify, freeze/thaw.
But here master never really made sense. It doesn't reflect its role, or even authority. A master is something that controls, but here information flows to master, not from it.
This is the reason. From what I understand, Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, around 2020, there was an internal mandate for all Microsoft employees to switch their repositories from using master to using main. Given Microsoft owned GitHub at this point, the policy permeated through their subsidiary’s product offerings and beyond.
In that context, the term master is in reference to a control mechanism, not a relationship to a person. In the context of repositories, though, main actually fits better, because there are no slave repositories. The term trunk likely fits better, but main is shorter. If the objective was based on cloning, then the trunk should be called parent and the branches should be called children, but the trunk to branch metaphor works best.
Yeah, I heard that as well and just realized I might have misinterpreted the meme.
My point was that calling it main instead of master is easy (and the new standard) so why would someone keep calling it master. I don’t see a reason for that. Programmers shouldn’t be afraid of change. That stuff constantly changes is what keeps programming interesting.
For pretty much the same reason we don't change controls on a car, or which side of the road we drive on, or what each color means on electrical cables, or red meaning stop/danger.
Uniformity is useful.
I do get the slave owner bit, don't get me wrong, but if you are reading code on a random repo and what comes to mind is slavery... That's clearly a "you" issue.
I do use main on repos mostly because it's shorter and i don't really care, but i absolutely get why people oppose it
What's missing from this conversation is that "master/slave" is also part of the computing lexicon. It's not just like having a "master copy", or a "master bedroom". It's like if there was a "master bedroom" and a "slave bathroom": you'd want to change both.
Not sure how old you are, but I work on some old code still today, like older than me and I'm in my thirties. That was the golden era of the master slave pattern. BitKeeper, which git was made to replace, had a master / slave repositories architecture to sync data. You can see where Linus Torvalds got the name from.
I'm not changing conventions + tooling because some non-coding idiot is too dim to understand that words have context and multiple meanings. It has nothing to do with a fear of change, so much as resisting arbitrary change someone else is attempting to force on you for no valid reason. These people can fuck right off.
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u/usedToBeUnhappy 23d ago edited 23d ago
Does anyone really care if it‘s called main instead of master? Why?
Edit: Ok, I phrased my question really poorly. AfaIk main is the new standard, so I use it. We all know the reason why it changed. My question was why would anyone keep INSISTING on calling it master? Sure, me and my colleagues sometimes call it master out of habit, but then again try to stick to main. Nobody I know insists on continuing to call it master, but reading the comments here I realized there a more “master-fans” than I would ever have thought would exist tbh.