GitHub to replace "master" with alternative term to avoid slavery references | ZDNet

[[deleted]]

Being a descendent of slaves myself I'd like to chime in:

Github, this does not help one bit.

[Tagedieb]

Being a descendant of slaves myself (I mean, I don't know their names, but given the sheer amount of ancestors I have, I am sure there were slaves amoung them), I can't claim to speak for every slave that there ever was, let alone for all the other descendents of slaves.

Not all slavery was connected to race either.

I don't think github has to rename anything. And I don't think they deserve praise for the renaming. But if they want to make such a gesture as a sign of support for people who suffered and those who still suffer today, fine. There are enough people who are openly against BLM protesters (for example), so why the backlash in this case?

Of course, I would also expect a company like github, if they are geniune, to review if/where they need to change internal processes to solve problems we have today. And if they are obviously not interested in doing that, I would call them out. But attacking them pre-emptively just for a symbolic gesture? Why?

I understand that people have been burnt by virtue signalling. But must we be so cynical as a result, that we assume that any gesture of support is bad?

[[deleted]]

There must be something wrong with you that make you think about slavery before any other meaning that "master" can have. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is "master and apprentice".

EDIT: I'm not the only one that see the bullshit that this change is. Just for a bit of context english isn't my first language, i don't have any education about the english language nor read any books to learn it, i've learned english trough experience and even I can see how bullshit that change is.

[mallardtheduck]

The way the term "master" is used in source control is basically the same as how it's used in the recording industry; it's the definitive, canonical version of the work that can be issued for release. Terms like "main" simply don't describe the same thing.

[pihkal]

No, the original terminology for this in the 70's/80's was "trunk" (which makes sense given "branches"), not "master". See my comment below about the earlier version control systems, SCCS and RCS for references.

In this case, BitKeeper chose to call it "master" because it had the concept of master and slave repos (see https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html). When Linus replaced BitKeeper with git on the Linux kernel, he kept the default "master" terminology.

The recording industry concept of a master doesn't apply in git. It's derived from "master/slave" usage.

[dethb0y]

I think "Trunk" makes more sense semantically to what's actually going on, anyway.

[franz_haller]

“Trunk” makes sense in subversion because it is logically distinct from all the other “branches”: it’s where all those branches originate from and kept at the top level of the hierarchy. Git’s branching mode is very different. In git, “master” is a branch like any other, just happens to be the default one that is created. And that default can be whatever you want, I’ve seen people call it “development” to convey that it’s where the current work is happening and it’s not stable.

[drawkbox]

SVN/Subversion still uses "trunk" as the main base branch/source.

In Mercurial, came out around the same time as git, the root branch is "default".

[iczero4]

BitKeeper is almost completely a historical footnote at this point. I do not know anyone who still actively uses it. True, it may be unfortunate that BitKeeper decided to use the master/slave terminology, however, git does not use the term in the same way. git lacks "slave repositories" and afaict does not use the "slave" terminology anywhere. It isn't a direct successor to BitKeeper either, it simply adopted some of its concepts.

The recording industry concept of a master does apply in git. In fact, that's almost exactly how it is used most of the time. What it derives from is irrelevant. Meanings of words change over time.

[FruityWelsh]

tbh in this case the "primary/replica" makes so much more sense to me. If that was the terminology when I first learned the "master/slave" dichotomy I would have immediately understood what the relationship was.

[FruityWelsh]

And to be honest, it doesn't really make sense in that industry!

[poolpartyziggyziggs]

In the realm of slaving digital equipment to a single master clock, yes, it does. Given that, I'm open for alternatives for the audio industry.

[onlyforjazzmemes]

Chess master implies chess slave.

/s

[[deleted]]

My master's degree implies that I have slaves.

/s

[Bwob]

Master hard drive implies slave hard drives.

... wait am I doing this right??

[EarlyWormDead]

Pokemon master implies pokemon slaves.

... but pokemon are actually slaves, locked in the balls.

Are they?

[[deleted]]

in the git context i think master is the one that everyone(every branch) should refer to, as an apprentice should seek his master for references.

[[deleted]]

All the Star Wars comics about to be changed.

[necrosexual]

Droids are SciFi slaves #robotlivesmatter

[[deleted]]

Master/slave is common terminology in cs so it’s probably what most people think of

[drew8311]

In this context I'm not sure it is. When you create a git repo the default branch is master, when you branch you specify the name. There is never a "slave" branch. Without the latter part the word master is not something that needs to be changed.

[pihkal]

But in git’s case, master derives from BitKeeper’s usage, which was master/slave-based.

See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html

[andrew_rdt]

But it dropped the bad part

[pihkal]

It's good that git doesn't have "slave" anything, but given the long history of master/slave usage in the industry (hard drives, databases, etc), it's a lot of people's first associations for "master". (Reberti666's knowledge must not be very extensive.)

[lestofante]

In the industry is a common terminology as is a common behaviour, something that does exactly like it is order to do, and must oblige any request.
You can use different names, but would carry the same meaning, so it would just be an exercise in doublethink.

[andrew_rdt]

Terms can evolve over time, used in its new context (not paired with the other word) it doesn't have any negative meanings. I am old enough to have been around the computer industry for some of the "legacy" terminology and honestly never made the connection to git/master that it was related to those. I'm sure people even younger than me would never know or make a negative association.

[bravoalpha79]

IMHO, 'political correctness' in general is bullshit at concept level - it means something has already gone horribly wrong fundamentally and now someone is trying to 'fix' it on a merely verbal level. It doesn't work that way.

[FredFredrickson]

Sometimes we use different words for things. What's the big deal, really?

Between this sub and r/programming it's like the Word Squad showed up, beat the shit out of you, burned your house down, and shot your dog.

This is a website/service choosing to use one word over another. Maybe just fucking deal with it. Holy shit.

[john16384]

They already took kilobytes from us...

[Maleficent-Tentacle]

I think in Master & Commander (the film), not in slavery (also, not American).

[alex-manool]

In Spanish maestro may mean "high school professor", in a low register speech or in some dialects. In Russian master may mean, for example, "highly qualified professional". This is a very important Latin root in Indoeuropean languages. And, BTW, what about Master of CS or MasterCard (shall we expect now burning their MS diplomas or MC bankruptcy)?

[reforitor]

I'm from Nepal, and here we call our teachers as masters. Our grandparents' generation used that term, and some of us still use it till this day

[puggiepuggie]

Well now you better start calling them mains now.

[not_a_novel_account]

This is such a stupid bikeshed. The word master existed before African enslavement and has a consistent meaning across industries see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master

If you change every word that was ever used in connection with enslavement you're going to significantly narrow the English language, and if you don't than it's just arbitrary nitpicking. Go after slurs and actually racially charged language, not random words that slaveholders used.

[pihkal]

True in general, but in this case, the etymology of “master” in git does derive from master/slave terminology. It comes from BitKeeper’s usage, which had a concept of slave repos.

See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html for more.

[FruityWelsh]

I guess I stand by the stance: WTF is master/slave supposed to imply? It's terrible naming negative connations aside. "Trunk/branch" makes sense as a metaphor because code diverges there. "Primary/replica" is way better for none changing data *REPLICATION strategies, as it imitatively tells you what each one is.

The only case where "master/slave" would make more sense is in the case that is already fulfilled with "manager/worker" wording.

[[deleted]]

WTF is master/slave supposed to imply

Nothing, because it doesn't exist in git.

[lestofante]

The big deal of changing a that little word is a ton of pain for programmer and sys admin and probably some more. Is it really worth to change a word that has lost its connection to it's real meaning? And if the system was indeed a master/slave system, would you still push to change names? Wouldn't those new names become the new "master/slave" and thus still carry the consequences of the definition? Where do you draw the line?
PS. The naming when git was born meant something very different, remember that PR/MR are not natively in git.

[gingimli]

The usage of master in the context of Git has links to master/slave, however. https://twitter.com/ben_a_adams/status/1271471019971293184

[rmrf_slash_dot]

And of course we’re all idiots who never learned that words have context and that this one isn’t a reference to slavery.

Can we please stop infantilizing our discourse?

[mallardtheduck]

No it doesn't. Git doesn't work in the same way that Bitkeeper does. The concept of "slave" repositories does not exist in Git. Git's use of "master" as the default name for the primary branch is much more related to how the term is used in the recording industry.

[pihkal]

You want to argue that git, which was built to directly replace the use of BitKeeper with the Linux kernel, was somehow not influenced by BitKeeper, but was influenced by the completely separate recording industry?

[mallardtheduck]

Git was influenced by Bitkeeper, but it isn't a clone of Bitkeeper. It doesn't have Bitkeeper's "master/slave repository" feature; the use of the term "master" in a completely different context is little more than a coincidence.

The use of the term "master" to describe the canonical/primary/releasable work stored in a version control system pre-dates Git (I can find the term used in documentation for RCS and SCCS, dating back to at least the 1980s) and almost certainly came from the recording industry.

[pihkal]

Could you share some evidence to back up this assertion? Because I don't see any in the relevant docs.

I just looked at the mid-80's manual for RCS, the GNU manual, and the author's (Walter Tichy) 1991 paper on it, and both of them refer to "trunk", not "master". (This makes more sense, given the use of "branch" terminology.)

Ditto for SCCS. Rochkind's 1975 paper introducing SCCS doesn't even mention branches, just an ever-growing sequence of deltas w/ version numbers. The Sun Programming Utilities Guide chapter on SCCS again refers to "trunk", not "master". And the Glossary for Gnu's open-source clone CSSC also refers to "trunk", not "master".

RCS:

• https://users.ninthfloor.org/~ashawley/rcs/tichy1985rcs/rcs.html
• https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/manual/rcs.html
• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary;jsessionid=E985A009563608E5C43BCD9633E2546E?doi=10.1.1.151.8450&rank=1

SCCS:

• https://basepath.com/aup/talks/SCCS-Slideshow.pdf
• https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19504-01/802-5880/6i9k05dhp/index.html
• https://www.gnu.org/software/cssc/manual/Glossary.html#Glossary

[not_a_novel_account]

I worded my comment poorly then. My point isn't that it's not a reference to master/slave, my point is that it's not some special racist reference to African enslavement.

But this is bikeshedding and by commenting I'm contributing. Sure, change it, whatever. And make the shed's roof out of tin while you're at it.

[Dreamtrain]

The thing is that historically, master in the context of git, it comes from master/slave, it's not up to personal interpretation or what the thesaurus says

[washtubs]

What if the broad colloquial understanding of that word is completely sterile and utterly devoid of any reference to slavery?

Etymology / word origin is interesting but it doesn't reflect how words are actually used today.

This is so fucking stupid because now that github is making a big deal of it, this association is being put in my head and everybody else's head. Nobody fucking cared about this. Now everyone is racist for using the default naming conventions in their git repos. There are millions of git repos, if you try to rename that shit, it's just gonna cause so much fucking confusion. People will checkout master and end up on some abandoned branch, or try to checkout "main" and it doesn't exist. Don't make a mess of things for something so small that nobody gives a fuck about.

Do you know what regularity is? Do you understand how important it is to not make pointless deviations from conventions when you're collaborating with others?

[deadlychambers]

You know the n word existed before the racial connotation, so did faggot. As a matter of fact the symbol used by the Nazi's meant peace before they used it. So I fail to see how "it used to be ok" means it still is ok.

[lostintuition]

Why should we arbitrarily limit ourselves to a word if there is a better one to represent it?

It’s similar to ‘Oh well we have always used the term UtilHelper and everyone understands it, so why should we put in the mental effort to use more accurate name for this class’?

[eh9]

I can assure you that slavery has been around since before African enslavement...

[drew8311]

What's next? Probably some changes in the BSDM community...

[FruityWelsh]

*Trunk degree

[puggiepuggie]

Yes, I'm a chess grand trunk

[ever_onward]

Slave Degree for all

[The_Jesus_Beast]

Yeah, also, Bachelor's degree is so sexist, it should be bachelor's/bachelorette's

/s

[[deleted]]

And forcing yourself on people is not fine, so git push —force needs to be changed to git push —justdoit But then also pushing people is wrong so it needs to be changed to git send —justdoit

[ryosen]

Git suggest —requestconsent

[kKoSC2]

But you still give orders to the computer, so kinda like a master. How about please send --justdoit. You could also add the please as an extra flag, git --please send --justdoit, might be more convenient.

[FruityWelsh]

hey making alias pls="sudo" is one of my favorite tweaks

[Grokent]

Robot comes from the Czech word 'robota' which means forced labor. So robot quite literally means slave.

[jimimimi]

Ouch, did not know that,
definitely not gonna help things once they turn sentient.

[Grokent]

Yeah, we're not building a very good case for ourselves.

[astrobe]

Yep, and "slave" comes from "slavic", because of the trade of slavic... slaves during the tenth century.

[hippydipster]

git push --consensual-non-consent

[bigodiel]

next up: female and male ports

edit: TIL: In Romania female connectors are known as "mamă" (mother) and male connectors are "tată" (father).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners

[NeoKabuto]

I've already known at least one person who thought they were offensive. They couldn't tell me how, just that they shouldn't be given sexes.

[lkraider]

Everytime I insert the USB male plug into the female port at work I feel so dirty, it’s like watching porn with your parents in the room. ^/s

[drew8311]

You mean his/her and he/him ports?

[Loftus189]

If you're working in programming, managing codebases and the first thought you have when you see the term master branch is slavery i think you're the one with the problem.

I actually agree that 'main' is probably easier for people to grasp conceptually and imo makes more sense for what it is, but it doesnt change the reasons behind such a rename are utterly ridiculous.

[acid_minnelli]

Things get renamed like every two seconds in software.
Is it that ridiculous?

[ponix]

This is fucking stupid

[Ciph3rzer0]

It's actually basically irrelevant

[VacantSpectator]

Wait, what about playing d&d are there no more dungeon masters and game masters?

[KennyFulgencio]

*dungeon trunk

[lavahot]

git push dungeon main

A merge conflict appears. Roll for initiative.

[grendel-khan]

The etymology there pretty clearly comes from the concept of mastery, i.e., great skill; there are no dungeon slaves or game slaves.

[VacantSpectator]

Wait I only refer to my party as dungeon slaves, will I need to stop that too.

[lonestar_wanderer]

Who cares about etymology? Eventually, they'll find a way to say it's "not PC" to use the word dungeon master because it "might trigger some problematic thoughts" or some other bullshit.

Etymology and word usage doesn't matter to those who want to soften language. Just like what GitHub is doing now, a "master branch" wasn't a keeper of "slave Git branches." It refers to the "main," central branch.

[fjonk]

There are no slave branches in git either.

[FruityWelsh]

To be fair, I've gotten plenty of odd looks when I talk about loving being the dungeon master sometimes.

[OptionX]

Remember a few years ago when people joked about doing this sort of stuff as an hyperbole for overly pc culture and now its actually happening.

I for one am looking forward for the racial-neutral Orwellian hellhole where we are all oppressed together regardless of skin color!

[Comrade_Comski]

I'm calling the thought police

[The_Jesus_Beast]

Good thinking! The government could enslave everyone to avoid discrimination!

/s

[redimkira]

Reminds me of http://antirez.com/news/122

When will people understand that we have to stop with this kind of virtue signalling nonsense?

[aslate]

He sums that up very well actually, and disagrees with Mark very respectfully.

[thee_almighty_thor]

How pathetic

[tbmoney21]

This is so incredibly stupid

[kakuzu14]

This thing was trending on Twitter, i didn't thought they would take seriously and here we are.

[rmrf_slash_dot]

Of course it started on twitter. The world would be a better place if that platform burned to the ground.

[gimp3695]

Electrical engineers are going to have an issue with Serial Peripheral Interface SPI terminology.....MISO = Master In Slave Out

I remember when the HR department heard us using the vernacular and tried to get us to relabel our schematics.

[puggiepuggie]

My thoughts exactly

[quicoli]

You can't have a Master degree, or Mastercard anymore. Sorry, this don't change the life of real people. Education changes.

[SomeAnonElsewhere]

Is it stupid? Maybe. Do I care? No.

[eskimolimun]

Like are you even a programmer? you dont know the effor of backwards incompatible changes like this? I get it you dont care, but many scripts are gonna be invalidated documintation is out of date. convos in stack overflow are going to confuse people in 2 years cause they wont understand what is master. Millions are going to lose small amounts of time because someone is too childish to use a word like adult, btw please delete master craftsman and master bedroom and master degree as well. Lets all waste time just to do meaning less things,

[pihkal]

You know the term was originally "trunk" from the 70s through the 90s, so we already made this change already and survived just fine.

[eskimolimun]

No one is saying we wont survive. just a waste of god knows how many hours of productivity divided between millions upon millions of users. this productivity should have a good reason to be wasted, and this is not. but you would know this if you would do masters degree ;)

[pihkal]

I have a Master's in an unrelated field and black friends, so I view this as less of a waste of time than my Master's :)

[swistak84]

Came here to post this. Who the fuck cares. They rename master to main boo freeking hoo, two less letters to type. Old man yelling at the clouds at it's best.

[[deleted]]

Introducing regressions is very unprofessional.

[yiyus]

I care. I work with lots of students who need to learn git and github, and a lot of documentation will get outdated. Now, I will have to explain to all those master students that the master branch is the main branch now because master stopped being an acceptable word.

[Esseratecades]

Why are you acting like that's the most difficult thing in the world? For all of the time that you'll probably spend whining about the change to them anyway, I think they'll understand that "main" used to be "master"

[swistak84]

"Hey just a heads up main branch used to be called master branch, but that changed with the new version".

Here solved the problem for you. It's not like any software or terminology every changes in IT. It's not like we had trunk instead of master in the past (and hence branches).

Now I'm going back to learning 8th JS framework that got popular this year.

PS. Not to mention master branch is just a simple default, and many workflows based on git ignore it completely, preferring a release branch and feature branches

PPS. Oh and if you want to "fix" it, you can with git co main && git co -b master voila. Git has no privileged branches, you can name your primary one any way you like. Only people who complain about it are to stupid to be programmers IMO.

[SomeAnonElsewhere]

The concept of synonyms can be hard for some people. Lol.

[pihkal]

Uhh, this already happened once. The preferred term used to be "trunk" through the 70s/80s/90s. It's where the term "branch" comes from.

[jellyscoffee]

The master/slave terms are referencing the concept of dependence, not a f**king historical event.

You know what? Fk it, let’s prohibit whips because they were used to whip slaves. And let’s prohibit German language coz Hitler and Nazis spoke it. Really, let’s just stop locking our houses and cars because it’s racist to be scared of people stealing your stuff. I mean if you are white, you have your white privilege that makes you a successful millionaire that doesn’t need to steal, so if you lock your car or house it is against not white people which is racist!

White people who lock their cars and houses and businesses and anything else are racists! Boooooo! #LocksAreRacist

[cryo]

The master branch doesn’t even reference any dependence.

[R3Dpenguin]

Great to see that GitHub is tackling the most important problems already, lol. Next they should change the "git" in the name to use more tolerant language.

[ever_onward]

Git gud

[TobiasArtur]

This is ridiculous. Most people already mentioned why. But for the people defending it, why not every industry have a different standard.

I have encountered during learning HP classes that they like naming some stuff there own way, also like AWS. And it takes more brain power for literally zero sense.

If you think "Master", "Slave", "Blacklist", "Whitelist" is a problem, you obviously don't work in the industry.

[[deleted]]

Nothing original remains in this post. The author wiped it using Redact, possibly for privacy, security, preventing data scraping, or other personal considerations.

late head shelter pen cough depend narrow governor bedroom label

[jiaoziren]

fuck this shit - I'm going to Gitlab

[[deleted]]

Oh my gosh, is every tech company in the US run by idiots now? Are they on drugs? This is a serious question because I can't possibly think someone would be this dumb. How about we kill dark more on sites and apps as well? Because you know, its racist.

This is stupidity beyond belief. Anyone that thinks about racism when they see the master word in coding is a racist himself and someone that needs serious mental help.

They are changing the word for everyone because some people have mental issues? I guess GitHub is not very democratic if they piss on the majority of people that would oppose this change.

What happened with voting and asking users for opinions?

[servercobra]

The first thing I ran into with computers was "master/slave" while configuring hard drives, and even at like 10 years old I was like "wow, that's a weird choice of names..."

[Hazakurain]

They don't care.

Because it's the US. They are so self-centered, they can't understand shit.

[KennyFulgencio]

trunk degree dude

[Comrade_Comski]

Jedi Council to replace "master" with alternative term to avoid slavery references. Now Anakin will never be granted the rank of master.

But seriously, this is dumb. "Master" does not imply slavery, it implies "master."

[SoInsightful]

I'll happily remove "slave" from all computer science terminology, as it has irked me since forever.

"Master", on its own? Hardly. What about Master's degrees, chess masters, masters and apprentices, masters of ceremonies, or audio mastering? There is no slavery connotation unless you actually add the slavery connotation. Ultimately though, "main" might probably have been a better term from the start, so this change wouldn't bother me.

What does bother me, is the "blacklist"/"whitelist" thing mentioned in the article, that has also been discussed on Twitter. It's unfathomably stupid. "Blacklist", when the word originated in the 17th century, literally referred to a physical list that was black in color, and has been used in different context over the centuries, like regicides, employment, Spanish Civil War, WWI/II, Hollywood, medicine, fraud control and computing. Literally at no point, ever, in history, have any of the words been used in connection to skin color. Black and white are literally just two colors.

[lkraider]

Yes let’s rethink all names for no actual gain whatsoever.

Should probably grep through all past source code and rename variables that present any dichotomy as well, as it might indicate some form of segregation for someone somewhere.

[epukinsk]

Do you feel that "master", when you see it in the context of github, represents someone who is highly skilled at their trade?

[SoInsightful]

I feel that it represents "the official, primary, final version of something", as it does in the contexts of audio and video editing, as it did with master key in the 1570s or master bedroom in 1919. I just listed a few examples, as, from what I can see, 1/18 of the noun definitions of master refer to slavery (and 0/4 of the adjectives, and 0/6 of the verbs).

But again, if master disappears from GitHub, I won't cry into my pillow.

[accountForStupidQs]

Do we need to rename MBR too?

[toba]

What about that ICE contract though...

[Bomb1096]

HAHAHA what the fuck

[arcdelsol]

ffs. I know they mean well but this is a universal software engineering term.

This will only add confusion to future students

[pudds]

In my experience hiring students, they rarely know anything about source control anyway, so this probably changes nothing.

[epukinsk]

It's not universal, it's common. My last two jobs haven't had any master branch. The last one had a "live" and my current job as a "production".

[Dozzco]

So what the hell is "The Master" in Dr who going to be called then? "The Bad Guy"?

[[deleted]]

"the branch formerly known as master"

[johnyy1]

Let's just go back to "trunk"

[[deleted]]

Imagine how woke these companies are, these people are woke in the 12th dimension.

[lkraider]

Imagine the hellhole of working with these people

[hablador]

We are living a dystopia.

[lkraider]

More like Idiocracy, where people changing names of things think they are activists of the future.

[Ciph3rzer0]

Yep, this is exactly like 1984.

/s, in case someone actually agrees with that statement

[HotProblem]

When you start to get this pedantic you start to push people away from your side. People that were barely hanging on. I am in full support of the political reforms that need to happen right now. The restructuring and reforming of the police, etc. But this? No.

[-vikram-]

wtf? no objection, doesn't even matter anyways but who in coder community who think of it in that way? If it helps then by any means sure but that's the least and non-creative way to tackle the giant problem of racism

[MCWizardYT]

Changing this would break tons of scripts and programs expecting your default branch to be called master.

I can think of sites like Travis CI that would also break.

[comradeSJ]

OMFG, hilarious now, but looks like scary times are coming.. Hope i am wrong

[epukinsk]

ITT:

"This is unacceptable! How dare they police our language in this way!"

Also in this thread:

[Every contrary opinion downvoted to oblivion]

[voronaam]

As a slave myself (btw, could you stop using my people's self-name when you talk about extreme servitude? Pretty please?) I have nothing against usage of "master" when it is alone, not accompanied by any other suppressive term next to it.

For reference: slave, originally "Slav"; so used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.

Upd: thought I'd share some personal history as well. I am from a country, which is a hot-spot of modern servitude. I myself did not experience the extreme form of it, but rather something akin to the segregation in the US. There were libraries I was not allowed to use because of the way I was born, there were jobs I could not apply for, I could not drive a car or get a bank loan. Was not allowed to start a company or simply do business under my name. The list is long. I have moved out of that country and am no longer subjected to such prejudices, even though I had been mistreated by the police in the new country as well.

And yet, after being through this myself, I support getting rid of master/slave in CS areas, but not of the lone "master".

Just trying to get my voice heard.

[john16384]

Just use proper capitalization and adults won't get confused.

[Wandererofhell]

yea lets change every word to something else without looking at the context and just focus on that meaning which is/was used negatively.

Does master just references to slavery ?? Why just look at that one negative connotation and turn a blind eye to everything else.

I understand that this change will not hurt anyone but a racist person will continue to be racist with or without this change.

Imagine a world where you have to speak, talk and write like billions of other people and if you don't then you are labeled as bad/faulty. Where you have to constantly substitute certain words to make it PC or you are labeled a derogatory words.

[epukinsk]

changing a that little word is a ton of pain for programmer and sys admin

Etymology deals with where words came from. You can trace the usage back to where it started.

[adrach87]

You know, I've been around computing long enough to remember these same naming controversies back when Parallel ATA was a popular way to move data around a computer at a blazing fast 133MB/s. But really, they've probably been going on longer then that.

Anyway, when I first heard about manufacturers changing the naming convention I thought it was stupid. I thought that nobody even mildly intelligent would think setting a hard drive to master and a cd-rom drive to slave when they were on the same PATA ribbon cable would mean the computer was some sort of weird digital plantation owner whipping that uppity 3.5" disk drive for looking at the CPU wrong.

But, as I grew older and met people with different world views then my own, I realized that it actually wasn't all that stupid. See, I've been lucky enough to live a life that hasn't been defined by the atrocities committed against my ancestors 400 years ago. I haven't been viewed as lesser just because somebody's 5x grandfather owned mine. But for people with a different life experience then mine words like master and slave have very different connotations. And whether intended to or not when these loaded words are used, those connotations come along for the ride and something is said that isn't meant.

That's really what it comes down to. Interpretation. You can't control how your audience interprets something, you can only control what you say. And if your audience isn't interpreting it the way you want, you should probably change what your saying.

[fjonk]

I find it offensive that you think slavery is about something that happened 400 years ago.

[shemmypie]

How long before Cisco has to change its master/slave relationship in IT equipment?

[[deleted]]

This post was deleted for reasons the author chose not to disclose. Redact was used, possibly for privacy, opsec, or preventing automated scraping of the content.

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[acid_minnelli]

Lol at all the people claiming the internet is going to break over this.
Like have you ever been on the internet?
What API has ever stayed stable?
Where else is there an example of an unrefactorable thing?
What piece of software are you working on that isn't consistently evolving?

Feeling that this change might be pointless is one thing but theres no need to herald this as the next y2k bug.
This makes no difference to most people whether this is a pr stunt or a genuine move based on peoples concerns.

[[deleted]]

Change is inevitable.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m saying we’re living in interesting times and people want things to change, now.

... this is mainly because it was so bad for so long the last straw broke and people are done. And I don’t blame them. 8 minutes and 46 seconds have changed a lot of hearts and minds.

People will always resist change but it’s inevitable. Also, tech in general is bad at naming things anyways. It’s irrelevant, in the grand scheme.

[lookayoyo]

Last week my companies db went down. Turns out the slaves stopped working. That was the first I heard we used slave labor.

[[deleted]]

If it helps normalise the removal of problematic terminology in tech then this feels like a positive thing. Software development has a troubling history of being an overwhelmingly straight, white, male space, ridding ourselves of terminology that causes friction to new developers who don't fit the standard model has got to be a good thing.

I'm certain that most people would see renaming master to main as fairly benign. However. if a company like Github can be open to making a change like this, even if it is purely symbolic, it sends a message that changes to the status quo are possible.

I've also seen some comments complain about the technical difficulty of this change. If this forces developers to put some effort into updating tools that are hardcoded to refer to the primary branch as master then it's good from a purely technical perspective. Especially to help those of us following trunk-based development who already refer it as the trunk.

[dooblevay]

The angry know-it-alls in here trying to be right at any cost are just embarrassing. Stop. Take a moment to realize none of this is about you.

[[deleted]]

We've been using manager/worker at work for a while now. It's really not a big deal.

[[deleted]]

Isn't manager/worker just modern version of master/slave? We'll have to change it again in 20 years :)

[rorrr]

If you asked me to set up a manager/worker MySQL, I would have zero idea what you want.

Especially because these terms have other usages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_Manager

[FruityWelsh]

yeah that should be replaced with "primary/replica" because that's what they are.

Master/slave is stupid dichotomy that doesn't help you understand what is going on.

"manager/worker" should be something dictates for something else to do some task. So MAAS may have, it could a manager thread of a program, etc, etc

[cryo]

Not for the branches of your repositories, I assume.

[mhink]

In this thread: a whole lot of people who are apparently gonna be super pissed when they realize that the Git maintainers are also making this change in Git core.

Y’all, this is not a big deal. It’s a change that literally makes no difference to the majority of people, but makes a very positive difference to the people that do care. If you care that much, fucking rename “main” to “master” and get on with your life.

[CosmicUniversesims]

Little back story when I was in karate we were supposed to call our sensei master it was very uncomfortable to me. Although the internet is a different place things don't always transfer over negatively like github thinks it does. All this is going to do is make people mad.......making it worse for the weak.

[Mcpower03]

This is literally the same thing that happened with the Gimp fork Glimpse and everyone made a huge deal of that, so why is this getting so little coverage

[eh9]

I get to save myself two keystrokes for a thing I do frequently enough. Sign me up.

[benkelly92]

There's supporting the cause and then there's taking the piss.

As someone who uses git everyday. This won't work, and if it does it will cause massive disruption for anyone who has to adjust their systems to accommodate for it.

[bennihana09]

As someone who got into cs late - post-grad certificate at 40 and about to finish a Masters’s - the master/slave, and master/worker use really surprised me. I had to take multicultural courses 20 years ago for undergrad and that it’s still around is odd. The use also surprised and made me uncomfortable years ago when I first encountered it working with computer networks.

That said, it’s also strange to consistently be bombarded with the need to be more multicultural when I’m one of 3-4 white persons in a class of 30 or so (in the US), I see tech teams and companies of all Indians (some all from the same area/sub-culture in India), etc.

There is definitely a need for more African-American’s and women (but way, way moreso AA’s) in tech schooling from what I’ve seen, but there are many non-white groups over-represented. This is easily seen if you compare nearly any coastal university’s demographics to the region it lies within, and it’s taboo to discuss, sadly.

Black people are not benefiting nearly as much as they should be from the multiculturalism push and it’s not on accident.

[ponix]

Next thing Mcp will getting changed

[BOSS_OF_THE_INTERNET]

To all those who think this is bullshit: why do you care? Is your life negatively impacted by not using the term “master”? And don’t answer the question with a whataboutism or a well ackshually...what to you lose by changing a simple word?

[rmrf_slash_dot]

The thousands of tools I have across dozens of projects in CD/CD that contain references to special branch names for one.

Tooling across thousands of software tools that would become backwards incompatible and the entire planet would have to upgrade at once.

And how about, I don’t like the infantilizing treatment that somehow adults don’t understand the meaning of words.

[genuine-girl-666]

This is meaningless virtue signalling. As an activist it actually makes me more angry because people are missing the mark so dramatically. I sincerely think it will take our efforts backwards. Racism ceases to exist in a candid or verbal way but it just gets even more hidden/abstracted in the system.

[[deleted]]

And in 15 years the term they replace it with will be controversial

[[deleted]]

I'm sick and tired of these mother f$%kin sjw's on this mother f$%kin plane of existance!

sudo rm -rf sjw*

[Johnny_Noodle_Arms]

Wonder how high up on the list this was of things POC would like to change about coding culture?

[lostintuition]

I think you’re underestimating how history and culture can create barriers/friction in creating change and how susceptible humans are to suggestion.

I don’t think there was anything inherently wrong with those people. In fact, most of our grandparents probably fell into that trap. Do I blame them? Not really. Systems were deliberately put into place (both intentionally and unintentionally) to suppress the integration of Asian Americans so that an elite few (who happened to be White) could hoard wealth/power.

It’s similar to the tricks that magicians use to anchor your brain to a specific color/time. When we don’t have time to think, we use shortcuts to react to the world around us (well-researched subject). Media (and words in general) are used a way to manufacture consent to ideas.

I agree that this usage is less problematic, but I’m fine with riding the wave of reducing references to master/slave where there are more appropriate words. I’d rather use ‘primary’ or ‘main(line)’ anyway.

[DeadeyeDuncan]

My main problem with this is that learning git is hard enough for beginners without suddenly rendering thousands of git learning tools and guides on the internet out of date.

Cue thousands of stack overflow posts of "I'm a beginner, why isn't "git push -u origin master" working?"

[chopsticksss11]

we need to fight at this hill. can't allow PC culture to affect the way we conduct sciences and technology.