This is a tiny change that has no substantial negative effect on anyone’s life. If they’d renamed “pull requests” to “merge requests” no one would care, at all. Let’s please not make a big deal out of it.
You know, i highly doubt any developer black or not ever looked and said “wow this master branch naming really makes me feel oppressed.” If this is you, please correct me. However, i do know lots of developers have bash scripts, terminal aliases, python workers that use the “master” terminology that will need to be changed. This seems like an absurd and unnecessary change to me, causing more net damage than benefit. Beyond git, i believe master is a power dynamic that exists and is sometimes the best way to model a system - and we should attempt to describe systems clearly unrelated to racism as accurately as possible
As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad.
Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.
I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.
In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.
Because you wrote "it's all very us centric too" - and I struggle to find out how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American interpretation of the words.
A lot of systems I use have renamed master/slave to leader/follower.
It set me back a moment the first time I saw it, and took me about 30 seconds to mentally internalise the change. After that first time, no issues as a reader of the code/config.
Leader/follower, primary/replica, sender/receiver, primary/fallback... not only do these phrases avoid the charged language of "master/slave", but they can also often describe the roles of the two components more precisely.
The historical usage of "master/slave" for the two drives on an IDE channel is a great example of the imprecise use of these terms -- it implies a relationship between the devices that doesn't exist at all. Both devices respond directly to commands from the host; the second device on the channel is not under the command of the first one.
As we transition to more dynamic clusters from older fixed infrastructure arrangements of the past, some of that terminology is dying on its own (not to imply we shouldn’t help it along).
Leader, for instance, implies a more fluid arrangement of the chain of command that better reflects what happens when a new machine takes over for a server that is having problems or being maintained.
This past summer I helped teach a bunch of students to code, students who were from under-represented populations here in the U.S. They were horrified to learn where the 'master' term came from.
Switching from master to main is a good change.
The 'master-slave' terminology has been used in tech for a while (for example, IDE [0]). Yes, it's not intended to be a direct reference to slavery, but that's where the term originated and it's clearly used to mean "one thing is in charge, the other thing follows orders". Yes, there's no explicit 'slave' term in git, even though BitKeeper did (apparently - I've never used BitKeeper).
It's not effortless, but it's not hard to change from master to main ( [1] ).
Plus, it's a great excuse to learn (or sharpen) your grep/awk/sed/etc skills :)
A couple of months ago I collected a few similar accounts, which were either given on HN or directly linked to from HN, over the past 10+ years of discussion of this topic.
No. This silliness is being done, allegedly, for my sake as a minority, and I will not countenance it.
If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater".
> If you're a minority and are tired of these word games instead of real change, make yourself heard. Let people know what you think of this pointless "diversity theater".
I am a minority in that I am left-handed. I have not yet discovered my minority powers but I'm sure they are growing and will make themselves clear to me one day so I can take my rightful place among the pantheon of minorities.
To be honest, I hope the opposite is true in that I do hope that the "diversity theatre" will be closed before that time, never to be opened again. Those who play in that theatre claim to support minorities but in fact all they do is drive people apart. It is as if their real purpose is to corral people into minority enclaves, to divide and conquer.
Think of all books and online articles that assume that ‘git push —origin master’ is a valid command. What about other companies who don’t adopt this change? Imagine you have to write an article about git and suddenly half of your readers start to complain that your examples don’t work. Yes, software do change a lot, but usually changes having such high impact are carefully thought out if the benefits outweigh negatives. Even people supporting this can’t give any compelling reasons other than “it’s nicer”.
If we take this change out of the current context and let’s say someone suggested that a year ago, do you think it would get the same traction?
I disagree. Renaming "pull requests" to "merge requests" isn't politically motivated, whereas this is a top-down change from political activists. I'm worried that society might go down a path where people can't push back out of fear of one's career or safety.
Political activists aren’t in positions of power at GitHub, so it’s not a top-down change.
I also disagree that it’s especially political. It’s a small name change to be more considerate. The only reason this is “political” — and “merge requests” wouldn’t be — is that for some reason a small group of people are very loudly offended by it.
A change from people in power is the very definition of top-down change. Words convey meaning.
It's hardly surprising the priesthood of developers rally against any changes to their sacrosankt nonsensical namings. Merge is different from pull/push though.
Policy changes can only come from people in power. I’m just saying the people in power at GitHub are not political activists.
Pull is literally an alias for fetch followed by merge. GitLab already calls them merge requests, which caused approximately zero drama, so we have empirical evidence that no one actually cares about these things when they can’t pretend to be offended by them.
There's already incredible amount of documentation around that uses the word "master". (New) people getting aboard will undoubtedly read the (now stale) documentation and get confused, confusion results in questions, questions result in discussions and discussions take time away from the already overburdened FOSS contributors that make great things happen.
All of this to give an appearance that social change is happening? Why not address the social issues head-on?
It's a change of territory in what amounts to cultural trench warfare. Partisans are constantly antfucking over what is and isn't appropriate terminology, or what constitutes a thinly veiled existential threat.
The change's symbolic significance vastly outweighs its immediate consequence, and naturally people will respond to it within the context it's been made.