I think the default branch name change has been good for the ecosystem; “master” didn’t always make sense for whatever workflow was used, and it was hardcoded all over a bunch of tooling. I think “main” makes more sense, regardless of politics, and this encouraged a lot of software to make the default branch configurable.
I’m worried about wokeness but I switched to “main” because I took the cue from Linus and because I figured the cost was (almost) zero and if it marginally improved the happiness of a potential future employee it was easier to do now.
In hindsight I agree, it feels like a better choice anyway - quicker to type and it makes sense. Win win.
That said my concern is that the “cost was zero” - one of the biggest problems with wokeness is it serves to distract from productive actions rather than sanctimony / tokenism / virtue signalling. Perhaps a symptom of twitter syndrome: virtual likes (easy, simple, shallow) vs real change (hard, messy, compromising).
When I start discussing the latest woke language debate, I remember that this pontification is exactly my objection, and that I’d be better off thinking about how I can help people who are poor or homeless or unable to access good schooling, rather than endlessly debating which words to use. There certainly is an opportunity cost, mostly on the political left as it neglects vital issues such as financial inequality, education, health, and deteriorating infrastructure.
Perhaps the best thing I could start with is to quit twitter to rid myself of the distraction? I don’t know. Anyone managed to work out how to navigate this?
You just have to be realistic and contextual with the conversations you're entering in.
In the above comments, I might as well very much seem like a virtue signaling SJW that would rather have a small language win than a hard-problem-solved kinda win.
However, outside of these few comments, I'm active in leftist political organizations and I've organized strikes, campaigns and more to best the actual lively hood of a lot of lower class (and therefor usually radically diverse) people.
Just keep in mind that this _is_ about language in this context. But for me as someone that tries to make every part of my live better for me people, this is also part of that, how small and ridiculous it might seem in it's effect.
Agreed. I was interested to read in the article that the master name does indeed originate from master/slave, because that doesn’t map to my mental model of git branching at all.
If “main” is a better description and offends fewer people, why not switch? Just seems like opposing a very minor change for the sake of it.
This will necessarily cause some people to hijack the reference branch by creating one branch called "master" and this branch may be used upstream (e.g. Debian builds) to create packages without approval from the main maintainer (who is committing in "main").
If there are any tools hardcoded to use master then there’s nothing stopping anyone continuing to call their reference branch “master”. These changes don’t even apply to existing repos, just as a default for new ones.
But that was fine because everyone used it. I agree "main" would have made more sense from the start, but changing it now is just a waste of effort and makes things more difficult (e.g. before you could have hard-coded "master" but now you have to figure out if it is "master" or "main").
The workflow I use on my personal repo (for stuff I can't/won't publish) doesn't even use a default branch, just feature branches and branches named after hostnames.
