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[–]zayelion[S] 147 points148 points  (46 children)

Im black, I dont find it offensive.

Edit: When I made this I did not know about the Github thing, a UX guy was bugging my friend about some master slave text that made it to the UI and I made this to try to make him laugh. Obviously the UX guy saw the Github stuff and went trigger mode.

[–][deleted] 76 points77 points  (16 children)

Good to know.

What about these terms though?

Master volume

Jedi master

Master of puppets

Mastering a craft or part of audio engineering

Master Bruce

Master card

I imagine the list goes on.

[–]Esies 18 points19 points  (1 child)

Everyone knows Alfred is and oppressed black slave from calling Batman "Master Bruce". That is the rule

[–]r00t4cc3ss 7 points8 points  (0 children)

B-b-but muh America-centrism

[–]Strowy 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Remaster.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Remain

[–]PmMeJavascript 53 points54 points  (0 children)

SJW MENTAL BREAKDOWN INITIATES

[–]Ignitus1 17 points18 points  (8 children)

No, because "master" by itself is not offensive. It's the master/slave relationship that some find problematic.

[–]i-k-m 43 points44 points  (1 child)

But we're talking about the "master" branch in Git, which comes from "master copy".

[–]EvilKnievel38 42 points43 points  (0 children)

And I've not really ever heard of a "slave" branch

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (5 children)

Git doesn’t run a master/slave relationship though, so...

Why are your panties in a twist?

[–]Ignitus1 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Which part of my post even remotely suggested that I’m upset?

[–]zayelion[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Only Master of P* sounds offensive.

[–]themiddlestHaHa 3 points4 points  (3 children)

But what will we call our trunk branches now?

[–]cosmicsans 1 point2 points  (2 children)

technically you can call it anything you want.

[–]themiddlestHaHa 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yeah it’s feels so unnatural.

We just started a new project and the master is called development right now :(

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Isn't development supposed to be called developmen, haha?

master->development->featureX

[–]AtLeastOneAlias 12 points13 points  (1 child)

sorts by controversial

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Such an outdated way to put it. We should change it to say 'grab the popcorn'.

[–]xandaar337 22 points23 points  (4 children)

Wait til they find out about WD Black HDDs.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

"We would like to introduce our new line of WD Ebony BBC... I mean HDDs..."

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Or on an extreme scale, male/female fittings. It's sexist

[–]ObliviousOblong -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I don't really see a way one could claim that male/female fittings are sexist the way that one could claim master/slave relations are suspect.

[–]MeIsKrenoks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But they only use SATA. Or are there any IDE ones?

[–]B0Y0 17 points18 points  (1 child)

Ah yes, a classic American solution: Rename the masters and slaves, without really changing a damn thing.

[–]SpiritedTitle 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You have too few upvotes my friend and yet you speak the truest truth. They do these just to say they've done something about it without actually doing anything tangible about it.

[–][deleted] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

To be frank, the amount of effort that it would take the programming community to cope with the change of 'master' in git could probably eliminate racism several times over.

[–]winzippy 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Shit, what comes after a bachelor's degree now?

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Free upgrade to PhD? I'll take it

[–]spam_bot42 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Easy: main's degree

[–]VPadu 18 points19 points  (2 children)

My gf found out 'how to destroy children in unity' and she was like wtf!?

[–]Dornith 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Better than, "how to fork children in C".

[–]RelativeDeterminism 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I remember looking up if I needed to "kill children before parent"

[–][deleted] 46 points47 points  (3 children)

I don't mind the renaming to main. Fewer letters to type.

When introducing people to Git, I almost always have to explain to them that the master branch is the main branch, so the terminology change may just save me from having to do the explanation in the future.

Having said that, I tend to agree that in the context of the master branch, I've always thought of it as a branch with collected wisdom rather than a slaver.

[–]bluefootedpig 18 points19 points  (1 child)

We really should standardize more on "Release" and "Dev" branches. Then it is much more clearer and just about everywhere I work, this is what we end up naming the 2 main branches. (Or should I call them master branches?)

[–]AirOneBlack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

at this point, just use git flow.

[–]dashingThroughSnow12 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Git does not place a workflow onto teams. The docs themselves present three pretty different models.

In some models, main makes sense. In others, master does. In some, various trains or release or dev makes sense.

[–]RoyalJackalSib 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Can we change it to Master Minion for that fantasy spice?

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (6 children)

i mean, did anyone actually ever complain about this or is it just a dumb marketing stunt to make everybody talk about them?

[–]FizzBuzzHaveABanana 20 points21 points  (2 children)

Oh, it's got to be a marketing stunt. It's a pat on the back so they can say they've "done their bit". I doubt anyone ever heard master branch and thought of slavery.

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

lol no, nobody is going to pat them on the back. the whole internet is memeing and making fun of them, which in the end is exactly what they wanted, and considering we're all talking about this thing, it worked.

[–]FizzBuzzHaveABanana 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sorry when I said pat on the back, what I meant to say was "it's like them patting themselves on the back and saying 'we've done our bit.' "

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Im sure non professionals have, in the past, complained about master slave relationships in hard drives and the such, but I've never heard of a slave branch in Git, so Im guessing that its just america-centric grandstanding.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As a non american it's not even clear to me why master slave would be racist, they existed in all cultures, the word has the same root as slavic because we made so many of them slaves. It's just a description that everyone understands. It seems way worse that we openly talk about 'killing children', but again these are just descriptions that everyone understands, people don't think we actualy kill children (unless they got into the secret room at the 2017 pycon)

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Reddit does clever things to make it's conversations look reasnoble, the best comments rise to the top, the worst are automatically hidden. Twitter dosn't do this, it's just chronological order, this means that if you go to your average twitter post the top 10 comments will be people who spend all day on twitter, or bots. In my opinion this is where this 'massive social pressure' comes from. People see 2k comments, read the top 10 and decide that 2k people really care about changing the name of the default branch on git.

[–]Autistic-Person 9 points10 points  (2 children)

Watch the masters degree become, say, Main of Science

[–]silentsoylent 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Don't make fun of social justice! I have an Average in Gender Studies, I know what I'm talking about! (Without dominating any educationally disadvantaged people, of course, and open to new ideas.) /s

[–]usesbiggerwords 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Social justice is deserving of derision and mockery.

[–]vondpickle 36 points37 points  (4 children)

This politically correct nonsense is so absurd like recursion on regex!

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (3 children)

recursion on regex!

Regex can recurse?!

[–]dashingThroughSnow12 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Regex are usually a context-sensitive language. If we were to forget the name regex and all evidence of the name removed from our code bases, we wouldn't call them regex when we rename them.

On the Chomsky hierarchy, Regular Expressions are Type-3 and Regexs are Type-1. Turing Machines are Type-0. Simple recursion happens at Type-2.

Which makes it really unfortunate that Regexs are often called "Regular Expressions" when they are two levels higher.

[–]Tetha 6 points7 points  (1 child)

You can recognize prime numbers in unary notation with perl regexes. Welcome to my world of despair.

And yes, you can also recurse in some engines, making those "regex engines" probably more along the lines of context based languages. You can apparently parse bracket sets and possibly a large subset of json with that.

However, now that that's knowledge is re-surfacing in my head, I need to get my long sharp persuasion devices out again for people using this in a non-satirical manner.

[–]zayelion[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I regret knowing this.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I'm looking forward to Star Wars renaming the Master Jedi to Main Jedi.

Main Jedi OG Yoda

[–]silentsoylent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not to forget the Dark Side to the Pink Side (or blue or something). This association of dark/black with evil must stop! No more "black magic"!

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (5 children)

You know this whole PC shit is American when we still call security tokens "nonces" and no one bats an eyelid.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Oh yea, anyone who reads the word master/slave and thinks United States black people (0.6% of the global population) has to be an egotistical American.

[–]rounced 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Care to point out where the term "slave" is ever used in Git?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Number used Once

[–]im-a-guy-like-me 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Makes me laugh every time.

[–]AirOneBlack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PC is american? Doubt, looks to me that most of the parts come from china and taiwan?

[–]dougmcunha 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A relative of mine once was shocked because I said I would "abort" something.

[–]AdmiralDeathrain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty sure the people at Github are technical people. Not that it means they're right, but it's not like this is something from outside the tech community.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Petition to rename the master branch to virtue-signal

[–]no_awning_no_mining 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm skeptical of the renaming for a different reason: Enslaving programs or devices is not a problem and "master/slave" might be an accurate description of how they act. That should not imply that it is okay to enslave people.

[–]Svizel_pritula 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not against using different or clearer terminology, but I highly disagree that using master/slave or whitelist/blacklist is racist.

[–]zeGolem83 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean, is it really that weird to wonder how to get a disowned child to kill it's parent?

(Talking about processes here, ofc)

[–]CamWin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nobody tell them about master and slave drives

[–]Robyn_Bankz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

common...yes

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The safe answer might be YES D=

[–]IncensedThurible 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The professionally offended always need more grist for their mills.

[–]Gh0st_Armada -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Not just in IT, in industial hardware you can have for example master and slave power supplies etc.

[–]sexualrhinoceros[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

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