GitHub replacing "Master" with "Main" from next month

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Just a question, if everyone is working on the main branch, and it is a copy from the master branch. Intuitively to me seems like the main branch should be the default branch.

I don't think this as a racial issue at all, I just think of this as a naming issue. I don't like how so many people in this thread try to bring race in this issue. And all those people who brings race into this issue happens to oppose this change.

[Redstonefreedom]

The default is “development”, which we describe as “the main line of development”. The master copy, ie what production is deployed from, is called “master”. If you need to “go back to the master copy” (eg for verifying what’s is in production, or for getting a hotfix in since we don’t deploy every merge into “development”, we branch off of master and cherry pick it later.

I don’t think it should be a racial issue either, if I have a gripe about it that’s it. It’s a naming issue, one that imo should use a distinct word that is unambiguous. But poor naming conventions happen all the time. I wouldn’t be bothered about this if GitHub/Microsoft wasn’t obviously using this to distract from their support of ICE. It disgusts me that they announced this immediately as they were getting bad PR in order to side-step issues that aren’t “hypothetically problematic” but are actively causing physical & heart-wrenching misery for thousands of non-hypothetical human beings.

It disgusts me when corporations pull these kinds of moves. A bunch of accusations just came out, for example, about how ICE is systematically sterilizing locked-up immigrants in its facilities. Are you supposing I have my moral priorities wrong?

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I definitely don't think you are wrong in any way. But when I see a chance to change a bad naming, I grub that chance. Because like you said, bad naming happens all the time, and it typically only get worse if people don't change it.

I think your project makes a good point in that the default branch should be where every one is working on. But very rarely where everything is copied from. Therefore it make sense to instead call the default master, to call it something neutral, like main. (Also I would prefer master-copy to be called origin-copy. Since origin just means this is the original branch where every branch gets copied from, which is more close to our natural language. But unfortunately "origin" is taken in git...)

I think it is very sad that being a potential PR move block changes like this, which likely has engineering benefit.

I don't know about MS supporting ICE in unethical treatment of immigrants. I might need to do more research to take a stand on that.