444
When you have to checkout the master branch
(lemmy.world)
Thank god the tech bros fixed racism back in 2021
It wasn't even tech bros. Some people started using opensource software, discovered the master branch and lost their shit. Nobody meaningful had ever connected the name to anything malevolent, but those people made themselves be offended in the name of people who weren't even offended by it.
Microsoft bought github and didn't want the bad press so they renamed it after the twitter shitstorm. The professional victims then moved on to whatever else made noise on twitter and that was that.
I force all new projects to use master as all my old scripts and repos use master. Twitter shitstorms scan stay where they should be: in the toilet bowl of the internet aka twitter.
Meanwhile GitHub was (and is) doing contract work for ICE
And yet people still happily use the platform. À la "smash capitalism" sticker on a Macbook Pro.
Curious! I am very intelligent
And think of all those poor processes being executed and killed.
And most of them are children!
For some of them, specially on servers, the execution drags on for hours and hours. That is just cruelty!
I don't remember every detail but what I do remember is the wave starting with pre-elon Twitter devs announcing their changes and it started with web services that had master/slave terminology. Some of the new terms did make more sense, but some were clearly stretches. And twitter being based out of SF probably has put forth the effort to hire maybe 5 to 6 black people over it's entire existence, so it felt especially shallow to me at the time. Hence the comment. Obviously there's some assumptions there about twitters hiring practice but..I really don't think I'm wrong, there's definitely a cultural issue out there in the bay.
I still see master branches everywhere, even my new personal repos. This git renaming story is one of the most stupid OSS pushes I remember. That and Gimp fork, that then died out I think.
I renamed my master branch slaveowner. To make it more clear.
It is software, my friends. It’s not a tribe of people.
You could do that, but I could argue that master/slave nomenclature isnt a good scheme for this anyway, since it doesn't control any other branches. Unlike master and slave drives from the olden days.
By all means go ahead and keep your naming schemes. It's your own stuff that after all, that for some reason you felt the need to tell everyone about. However, I might recommend trying to move past it seeing as language has an impact on how people think, and being edgy doesn't exactly have a good track record of producing the best people.
I always assumed the name was more of a reference to audio Master Recordings.
It's the original tapes or whatever that all copies are derived from. It's also where the term "remastering" comes from, as in "we went in and rebuilt a new master from the individual tracks, and this is the new master now", versus just making another copy of the master for a re-release.
You're right, it isn't a master/slave drive. It...never was intended to mean that, though.
There are no slave branches like there are no slave recordings.
*whips my hard disk*
How about a "daddy" branch?
My “master” branch actually does control other branches, as releases are usually made from it, so they all depend on it.
it has always bothered me that checkout is overloaded: it can switch branches or discard pending changes in an unrecoverable way.
so, PSA, you can replicate the safe part of checkout with git switch and the unsafe with git restore.
I agree, I wonder why they decided to design it that way in the first place.
Ah, I love coherent software.
Switch and restore came later because checkout was problematic.
Has someone made a „Checkout considered harmful“ blog post yet or do we not do that anymore?
E we used to always stash before checkouts to try and find things in a branch
Just alias stuff like that, make it coherent.
git push master --force
I never understood why we moved away from "trunk".
Transcription
The "It's an Older Meme, But It Checks Out" meme, featuring an image of an Imperial officer from Star Wars, with the caption:
It's an older branch, sir
But it checks out
I usually create new repos through GitHub or another central repo's system, where it defaults to calling the main branch main. But I did recently create a new repo with my local Git's git init, and had to deal with a master branch on a completely new repo for the first time in a while. It was actually kinda a weird experience.
git checkout -b main
git branch -D master
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
You don't have to deal with shit if you don't want to.
If you haven’t already found it, you need to change your global git config (~/.gitconfig):
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
(or whatever you want to call it; e.g. daddy would work too)
For any existing repositories you want to run the following command in the existing repository root (./.git/config):
git config set init.defaultBranch main
daddy branch.
Love it.
Yeah, current company has their internal git server default to master and it was a little odd first time I created a new repo. Luckily all the CI templates can recognize either name so I just switched it.
No latest branch
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
444 points (100.0% liked)
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