Git 2.28-rc1 Released - Continues The Transition Towards SHA256 Plus Moving Off "Master"

[SuperSandro2000]

Making the default branch configurable is a great plan to not mindlessly break half of the internet. Hopefully people start to drop the hard coded master branch and everything goes smoothly.

[cl333r]

Git itself should be renamed as it’s an old English term for a fool or someone of no worth. Not very inclusive is it 🙄

But it should start with a G and should be inclusive, so I propose gaylord.

[anarki2]

No doubt. But slavery is not such a point, surely.

Git only has a master branch by default. There's no "slave" branch. A "master" doesn't imply slavery. Or mastering. Context, people, context. Do you want to ban white rice and black holes as well? They have just as much to do with racism and slavery as the master branch in Git. As in, nothing.

[polarathene]

Soon every word will be banned and everything will have to be yes and no.

That's so....divisive, why not just aladeen?

[boxerab]

I think that changing the name from master just because someone is offended is a double-plus-ungood idea.

[polarathene]

Git only has a master branch by default. There's no "slave" branch. A "master" doesn't imply slavery. Or mastering. Context, people, context. Do you want to ban white rice and black holes as well? They have just as much to do with racism and slavery as the master branch in Git. As in, nothing.

Master thesis, masters degree, master key, master bedroom, master copy, master chef, scrum master, I wonder what all these are going to be changed to.

I'm surprised they haven't gone for brownouts and blackouts, words related to the loss of "power", someone will catch on to that soon enough :P

How has there been no equivalent action taken about parent/child relationships in the industry? We literally have parents terminating their children for bad behaviour or because the child is deemed a waste of resources harming profits. I'm disappointed that such an opportunity has been ignored, I'm sure one could correlate the relationship as master/slave in cases like process management too, where the parent controls the rights of the children.

Personally, changing the paint doesn't fix the problems people associate to words, not like the purpose or intent changes, it's the negative associations to the past where actual harm was done that needs to be properly dealt with :/

[higgslagrangian]

I assume everyone authoring/committing these changes in each of the repositories is going to stop buying computers, electronics, and all products made in Asian sweatshops, right? You know, modern-day slavery? Oh, I see, that's not really convenient, is it?

It's so easy to criticize the past. Today's reality will be a horror show in 200 years. I know we are "used to" sweatshops today (even if we are all "oh so outraged!!" by them).
Well, same shit. 200 years ago lots of people were horrified by slavery. Changing the status-quo is not always that simple (it took a whole f*** civil war in USA, and that's still raging today, look at all the idiots waving Confederate flags).



I hope nobody is going to say I'm condoning racism. If you think that, re-read this until it gets through your skull. This is criticizing hypocrisy and slavery in all its forms (be it the obvious chained-slave, or today's sweat shop).

To give an example: it would be the equivalent of banning the word "sweat" in 200 years from today.

[tomas]

It's funny that so many people think this has anything to do with "inclusive language" when it's most certainly just about good programming practices, about sound software engineering practices. It makes perfect sense to not have a hardcoded name for the default branch throughout the git source code. To have the *possibility* to have a different name for this branch when creating a git repo makes perfect sense. Just google "git master branch name change" to see all the page hits. It's not an uncommon request and it has nothing to do with "inclusive language".

Edit: For example, look at this question on Stack Overflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8762601/how-do-i-rename-my-git-master-branch-to-release

[andyprough]

hey man, did you make that strawman all by yourself or did you get it from the shop?

Tries to win a brainlet logic debate on inclusiveness. Calls opponent "hey man".

[CommunityMember]

The keyword there, though, is "default". While the name is indeed used in many scripts, most of those scripts are written for the purpose of interacting with existing repos, which will remain as "master". A change of the default name would only be relevant for repos created in the future... so while some scripts will certainly be broken, it's probably not as many as you might be imagining...

Sadly, my finger muscle memory will also be broken ("git checkout master" is semi-automatic to me for some of my workflows working with various projects, and it is a rare repository that does not use the name master). I do wish that there is some general consensus on the replacement term, so I do not need to remember whether the name is primary, main (seems to currently have some mindshare), trunk (for the rcs crowd), dev[el] (the way the branch is often used), default (what is a better default name than default?), upstream, or whatever, depending on which organizations repo I am working in (yes, I do realize I have already lost that battle for branch names, as many projects have their own convention).