The meaning is exceedingly clear. Mindless actions ignoring context completely miss the entire point of the exercise, serving only to waste people's time with virtue signaling.

I in no way oppose changing the standard from "master" to "main" for new repositories, but going back and trying to change things with unknown dependencies is just going to cause more problems than it solves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know the history of who started the master/main debate. if it was a bunch of white people trying to show how progressive they were while black programmers were like "yeah, we don't care", then it's virtue signaling. If it was the black programmers being like "this phrase feels weird to us... can we change it?" .. then it's not virtue signalling, it's listening to underrepresented voices. I legitimately don't know which scenario it is. I'm also not in a position where the word bothers me at all, but I also have an easy life, and if someone tells me a word used in a certain way feels weird and I can resolve that with 0 effort (ie, switch new projects to main), I will.

And of course about the retroactive changing, which is why I said I wouldn't expect linux to change.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I mean when you look at the inclusion of slave being used in the same context it’s not so clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)

[–] JackbyDev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There aren't "slave branches" though. Yeah, there are places where master/slave terminology exists in computing but git branches aren't one. Full disclosure, I prefer main personally just because it is less characters lol.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There were such a thing as slave branches, though; not in git itself, but git was modeled after (and inherited the term ‘master’ from) bitkeeper, which had ‘master’ and ‘slave’ repositories.

I’m not sure that’s super relevant or important, these days, but, it feels worth getting the history right. The term ‘master’ as used in git can be traced directly to a master/slave usage, not a ‘master copy’ usage.

[–] JackbyDev 4 points 1 year ago

Good point, I stand corrected then! That makes it trickier to talk about because it could just as easily mean the other usage of master now while still historically being master/slave.