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How to bring back master branch?

9 points by peterhadlaw ↗ HN
Not interested in flame war but a genuine concern of mine is reinstating the default branch to master, not for me, but for us as a dev culture. I can imagine a new generation unaware of the political correctness that led to this change in the first place.

28 comments

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nobankai
WRT github, you just skip the second line when adding your upstream origin.

If you mean the greater global consciousness... nobody cares. Main is 2 fewer letters to type, you'll sound like a madman advocating for anything else. It would be easier to bring back eight-space tabs or BSD coreutils. You should make your peace with it one way or another and find a productive hill to die on.

techorange
Yeah, it's going to be an uphill battle convincing me to go through and talk to my co-workers to convince them this is something we should do, then change all of my branches back, against the defaults of most git providers. All for?
peterhadlaw
I'm saying get the git providers to change the default back too.
techorange
If you're going to convince me that you're "anti-woke" suggestions are better than the "woke" suggestions that got us here in the first place, do so in the traditional way. Make an argument for why moving back to master makes substantive improvements in my workflow as a developer and not because you find it aesthetically concerning. And why it is financially beneficial for the globe to spend the engineer-years it would take to make this change.

Also, I don't know that I'm convinced that 'master' in this scenario is more descriptive than 'main'.

peterhadlaw
The change originally was never about developer experience.
techorange
This is sort of the inverse of the sunk cost fallacy. We are where we are, if we want to move back, it's not implicitly rational to move back solely for the opposite reason that we moved forward.

Moving back has additional costs, it doesn't simply undo the costs of moving forward.

nobankai
Why? To make people type more letters and waste their employer's time?

For the record; I still use master branch for personal projects. But trying to impose it on anyone else is madman-levels of obsession that you might want to work out with a therapist. It simply does not matter to anyone with actually relevant priorities.

peterhadlaw
It wasn't obsessive to change it in the first place?
nobankai
Not really, "master" is about as indistinct of a term as "merge" and "rebase" are. There are huge amounts of git ergononics that can be improved and master branch is one of them.

If it wasn't for muscle memory and my bash aliases, I'd be using main too. Get a life and stop bitching about default environment variables, it's a huge red-flag to employers.

peterhadlaw
We aren't going to rehash the whole history here and it's disingenuous to try discussing the accuracy / pertinence of the word master here when that wasn't what originated the change in the first place.
clipsy
If you can't formulate an argument as to why "master" is meaningfully better than "main", you are no better than the culture warriors who insisted on changing it in the first place.
peterhadlaw
How/why to justify something that was unjustified in the first place?
clipsy
I'm not asking you to justify something that was unjustified in the first place -- I'm asking you to justify what you're asking people to do now. Why is it worth everyone's time and effort to migrate back to using "master" rather than "main"?
peterhadlaw
To remove the political prejudice injected into it.
Jtsummers
What's the purpose? The name is arbitrary, and in context they mean the same thing. So why do you care to change the default back?
uberman
My view is let the sleeping dog be. I see no compelling argument to change it other than spite.

While never personally bothered by then legacy terms, I can accept that they cause unease for some. On the other hand, I find resisting change or advocating to undo this change in the name of preserving history to be simply spiteful.

Our entire domain is defined by constant change and you swim needlessly against the current to lament that we do not go back to some prior state.

peterhadlaw
It's okay to course correct and have principles though. One can go forward again after going backwards.
techorange
What principle are you trying to uphold? Change is bad? I haven't actually seen you present a compelling principle.
rvz
That ship has sailed and it's too late. Emotion triumphed over reasoning in May 2020 for Git.

That was the only time experimental pretrained language models were actually smarter than those who supported changing the default branch to main for unjustified reasons.

At least BlackHat® and the security industry resisted this nonsense.

baggy_trough
"main" is better than "master" because it's shorter. The noxious politics are irrelevant at this point.
thiht
Also it's semantically clearer. I keep `master` as a branch name on my old services because I don't care enough to change it, but for new projects `main` is clearly a better name.
dabinat
With everything going on in the world right now, why are you choosing this particular hill to die on? It doesn’t matter.

However, I do agree that the word “master” has a lot of different meanings that don’t have to do with slavery, so I don’t consider the word offensive by default. But I don’t think changing a default text label is worth getting on a soapbox about.

huslage
You are starting a flame war.
thiht
Use master as a branch name for your projects if you want, no one will stop you. But really consider if you believe "master" is a better name than "main" for the main branch of your repository. Like, imagine you're creating git today and need a default name for the main branch: is "master" the first name that comes to your mind? is it "main"? is it something else? This is the question you have to answer in good faith.
peterhadlaw
Main, and I promise you, is not it. Trunk? Maybe. master is on the top of the list. I was never opposed to folks using trunk (years before PC stuff).
jfengel
Your argument for changing it is not that the old way was better, but merely that it was the old way. But if dev culture has already shifted, then it is the new "old way". Any further change would be equally disruptive, even if it's to the "old old way".

That strikes me as equal-and-opposite political correctness. It's not done for a technological reason, but because you want to punish ideological opponents.

To answer your question: go ahead and say that. There are plenty of people who support your goal.

peterhadlaw
It's not about punishing at all. It's about undoing the smearing / poisoning of what was otherwise an innocent thing free of politics. Now forever that branch is stained with political correctness. If we undo it, it can be undone and made free again.