this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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My Git Knowledge (lemm.ee)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Fuck those that use master. If you're working on a library fork that has main and a project that has master you're bound to invert the two.

"What do you mean I can't checkout main? Oh right, here it's master..."

For once that we had a standard, it had to be ruined.

The standard is now main.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The standard is now main.

Git itself does not use that standard yet, so at least now there are two competing standards.

I get that there are cultural reasons why the word master was loaded language, but still, it's not like institutional racism will go away. Meanwhile, the rest of the world which doesn't struggle with the remnants of slavery has to put up with US weirdness.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Git itself does not use that standard yet, so at least now there are two competing standards.

Just ran git init in a brand new empty directory, and while it did create a master branch by default, it also printed out a very descriptive message explaining how you can change that branch name, how you can configure git to use something else by default, and other standards that are commonly used.

Also, there's nothing saying your local branch name has to match the upstream. That's the beauty of git - you have the freedom to set it up pretty much however you want locally.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, there is no one standard now. The stupid thing is all the problems that causes is mostly because there used to be one, and stuff written assuming master branches are eternal.

I've had a company that had some automation built on git but below GitLab that would not let you delete master branches. When main became a thing, they just started hard protecting those as well by name. It's because of regulatory, and they are very stingy about it.

So when I created a few dozen empty deployment repos with main as the default, and then had to change it over to master so that it lined up nicer with the rest of the stuff, I've had a few dozen orphaned undeletable empty main branches laying around. A bit frustrating.

That said, the whole thing is just that. A bit frustrating. If it makes some people feel better about themselves, so be it. I am blessed in life enough to take "a bit frustrating".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that's fair, I can see how that would be annoying for sure. I think that frustration stems more from company policy though, not necessarily the standard changing. And you know what they say, there's nothing certain in this world except for death, taxes, and standards changing

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

It is trash code for sure, but most of the world's code is trash, so we do have to accommodate trash code when we design stuff. That said, they do need to do this to comply with laws and make sure code doesn't get lost (it's finance), and this was the easy way to do it. Doing it better would have taken time and attention away from other stuff.

And standards do change, but they usually change to accommodate new features, or a new software product displaces an old one. I don't really know any tech standard that changed because of cultural reasons. Point is, change is a cost. It may be worth to pay the cost, but here the benefits were US cultural sentiments that most of the world doesn't care about.

And the stupid thing is that even when standards change, you are not usually labelled as culturally out of touch if you don't follow it. Most big orgs don't follow changes that they don't need to. Nobody calls you a bigot for running COBOL mainframes in 2023, but they might if you predominantly have master branches.

I guess my perspective is that some people I know were mildly annoyed before lunch about it one day two years ago, since nobody cares about US identity politics, with my personal opinion being if the US didn't fill up its for-profit prisons with black people who it then those prisons profit off of (just as an example), the word master would not bite as hard, and the whole thing would be moot.