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0 pointsdijit1y ago0 comments

my controversial opinion is that it never mattered, all that really mattered was that there was a universal word- changing it to anything would cause at least a few hundred hours of development work and a few hundred additional hours of changing documents and tutorials and stuff.

For what? Main isn’t better if the issue is racism, because “main” has some really negative connotations in Korea (“main” families having servant families).

And, for crying out loud. the tools name is literally a mild british swear word.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

651y ago· 3 in thread

Fair point, I don't think it should have been changed in the first place. But it's been changed whether we like it or not. If it was "main" in the first place I think that's still a better name than "master."

layer81y ago

“Master“ implies that the contents is authoritative somehow, as in “master copy” (meaning 13 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun). “Main” doesn’t have that connotation.

When one is willing to discard that connotation, then, if anything, “default” would be a more accurate name, because the fact that it is selected by default in certain situations is really the only technical difference compared to other branches.

laughinghan1y ago

> "Main" doesn't have that connotation.

It has had the connotation of "mainline", a synonym for "trunk", in version control since before Git existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(version_control)

Presumably this was originally due to the connotation of the railroad mainline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_line_(railway)

dijitOP1y ago

I agree that if it was main before it shouldn’t have been changed.

The whole branch naming thing is still only half implemented fwiw. Lots are still master, the default for new branches seems to be main. At my company it is “develop” for git.

Other VCS software uses a totally different name, perforce uses main for example.

I don’t really care what it was, it could have been “killwhitey” and I still would have been against changing it because of the effort involved in changing every repo on earth and the invalidation of every tutorial in existence.

tgsovlerkhgsel1y ago· 1 in thread

This.

What makes it worse:

- Each "bad" term gets replaced by multiple alternative terms, often non-obvious, so good luck figuring out what people mean now. For example, MitM (Man in the Middle) was a well established technical term. Everybody knew what was meant, the term had no acutal gender association in the meaning, but now you instead read "machine-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle, person-in-the-middle (PITM), or adversary-in-the-middle (AITM)".

- The "it's more descriptive" excuse was used as a very thin veil of justification even though the actual reason for the change was clear. So not only do you get to deal with the extra hundreds of hours of overhead, but you also have people lie to your face about why you're being forced to do that.

- It never ends. First it was "master/slave", then "master" in any context, and once that battle was "won", proponents of such policies started finding new "offensive" words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack#Notes

wiseowise1y ago

This is the first time I ever see any of these.

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thefourthchime1y ago

Good point about the number of dev hours dedicated to this.

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