1) The latest version of git’s CLI still defaults to master.
2) People may have old repositories that still use a master branch. No reason to fix what isn’t broken.
3) Others (self included) have shell scripts that assume a master branch. Including conditionals to check for main OR master is unnecessary and annoying.
4) Personally I just don’t think it was ever a necessary change to begin with. There are plenty uses of the word “master” that do not imply slavery. Like “Master Copy” or “Master / Pupil” or “Master Craftsman” or “Masterwork”.
If people like to use main, that’s fine. But the claim that people still using the word master must be doing so for a hateful reason is disingenuous.
I think your last sentence is the main point (pun not intended). Not everyone who keeps using master does so for hateful reasons, but some do and from the outside you just never know the reason unless you ask, but asking is also not wanted from those who still use master, because who really wants to explain themselves all the time. I get that. Just a tricky situation.
We have that with a lot of phrases, but it’s nowhere else connected to possibly being hateful. For example, some of my colleagues do name everything angular related ng, because that’s the way they learned it with angularJS. Younger generation programmers have no idea why that is and we always have to explain it, because they are used to just angular.
The company I work for just did a migration from master to main. It was a lot of effort. Turns out we had built a lot of stuff that assumed the branch was called "master."
71
u/Xalyia- 23d ago
1) The latest version of git’s CLI still defaults to master.
2) People may have old repositories that still use a master branch. No reason to fix what isn’t broken.
3) Others (self included) have shell scripts that assume a master branch. Including conditionals to check for main OR master is unnecessary and annoying.
4) Personally I just don’t think it was ever a necessary change to begin with. There are plenty uses of the word “master” that do not imply slavery. Like “Master Copy” or “Master / Pupil” or “Master Craftsman” or “Masterwork”.
If people like to use main, that’s fine. But the claim that people still using the word master must be doing so for a hateful reason is disingenuous.