[bschne]

With the GIT thing my usual stance is that there's no need to make this a hill to die on. Some people feel better about it, it's next to zero effort, so it's no big deal wether I personally think it's absolutely necessary or not. I don't think it's a high priority or high leverage thing to do against racism or for inclusion, but I don't mind when GitHub goes "you know what, main is nicer for some people, let's switch".

But the ant colony thing in the SA piece sounds a bit like saying software engineering is a "problematic" field that should be critiqued because it often uses a VCS that at some point in the past opted for a very common set of terms that some may now consider offensive.

I could try to rack my brain for all the more or less charitable interpretations of what she is actually trying to get at with that sentence, but viewing it in the context of the whole piece, I think there's not much of a there, there.

[tomp]

The problem with git master->main is, that if you don’t say “no”, there’s always gonna be the next thing. Like “ant colony”. Ironically Scott Aarson has himself written about this, after having realised he was, like you, wrong for not saying “no”. (Too late.)

You have to say “no”.

[gspr]

I don't buy that logic. I have absolutely no problem with the word "master" for e.g. a main branch, or for something that controls something else for that matter, but why wouldn't it be OK to let someone do all the work of changing a fine word into an equally fine one? How does that force you to do non-neutral, negative, changes in the future?

[tomp]

In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

[gspr]

> In your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle.

Why should I spend energy to try to gauge their motivations? And why should I care if I don't like the outcome of that estimation? I feel your criticism is refusing to admit a (low-priority, highly cosmetic) bugfix into an open source project because you don't like the political views of the committer.

To me, it's a pure calculation:

* To me, the words "master" and "main" equally well describe the most-important branch of my git repository.

* To some people, "master" is offensive. I don't understand this at all, but to these people, "main" is better.

* Someone else is offering to do the work.

So letting them is a net change for some people, and neutral for me. So why not?

> Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed.

Also by ignoring non-negative contributions from such people?

> If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying

That's the pointing: I'm arguing it has non-negative technical merits. So why care?

I'd be all on your side if "main" wasn't actually an equally good word! In fact, I think I'm driving people a little bit nuts by opposing things that have small negative impact all the time. I try not to compromise in that department. But I'm simply arguing that changing "master" to "main" here has no negative impact.

[stickfigure]

It's often not such a trivial change. Depending on the profile of your project, it may affect a lot of people and a lot of tooling downstream. That person volunteering to "do the work" isn't really doing all the work.

[gspr]

Sure. But user tomp's arguments don't seem to be relying on a hypothesis of non-trivial change.

[janto]

"no need to make this a hill to die on" is what you say to someone to take away their ability to say "no". Don't make it your usual stance.

[anonymoushn]

Having different names for main branches in different repositories is "next to zero effort" like git submodules are "next to zero effort"

[Siira]

Next to zero efforts for you. I have lost hours debugging issues caused by it, and I am sure I will lose some more in the coming years.

[barfingclouds]

Acronyms are fun