Hello PCMR community!
On July 13th, we asked the community for your opinion if you would like to change the name of this community.
Results of the Survey :
- Yes - 28.1%
- No - 71.9% (winner)
Of the 1,201 responses received, we as a community have democratically decided that we should not change the name from PC Master Race. I am grateful to our community for your input, as this was a difficult topic to navigate together.
If you would like to review the history of this, please check out this post here: https://lemmy.world/post/1430610
We’ll pin this post for some time and then consider adding a bullet into the sidebar for this Community to help stave off further discussions around this topic as the community has already decided collectively.
Kind regards,
The Moderator Team
@Hurts@lemmy.world @_MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world @Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world @IowaMan@lemmy.world @BobaFett26@lemmy.world @The_Vampire@lemmy.world @Fudgeknuckles98@lemmy.world @CatZoomies@lemmy.world @Xeon@lemmy.ml @geosoco@kbin.social
EDIT 30-Aug-2023:
Due to some of the recent targeted attacks against Lemmy.world, I noticed that the image I shared with this post was purged from their servers.
Here’s a new screenshot of the results for posterity: https://i.postimg.cc/jqNg5gWx/pcmrsurvey.png
Good for you, gamers. We programmers have lost the master branch forever.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but as someone who just started programming like 2 years ago, main makes more sense and is a more approachable name to me than master
Going to change to anything that made sense in git, trunk would have made most sense (or something along those lines). Since your project can have many branches… Tree puns!
But changing it after the product was out was a dumb idea regardless of whatever makes sense and what doesn’t. It was blatant pointless virtue signaling that broke some automation and makes a bunch of documentation needlessly confusing (someone just starting out and seeing main but the book they bought to learn says master… Now has to find out why).
Edit: my terrible spelling and grammar
pointless virtue signaling
What do we want? An end to blatant racist murders by police!
What do we get? Rename our git branches!
While convention is not about making sense (does Java class names make any sense?), master makes more sense in this case because main implies that there are secondary that’s not related to it. Which really shouldn’t happen in any sane repo.
Wait, what? When did this even happen (in general)?
Ah, screw this. I’ll probably keep “master” in anything that currently has it, and the next time I start something I’ll just go back to calling it “trunk” even though I was too young at that point to actually call it trunk, but it makes the most sense for the organization flow.
The concept of a master branch reaches back to CVS (that’s Concurrent Version System, not a pharmacy), and Subversion. Makes sense it wouldn’t make sense to you. Frankly it doesn’t make sense to git at all, but that’s a much larger discussion.
The concept of a “master copy” has been around and in widespread use for around a century. It has nothing to do with either software nor social (in)justice. It’s just the thing you photocopy so you don’t end up making photocopies of photocopies. IMO It should make sense to anyone who, you know, has seen and used paper within their lifespan.
Some terminology, like “master and slave” for IO between devices, did always used to make me really uncomfortable whenever I heard it. But the branch name for software was probably fine.
I still use it. When GitHub first forced it on everyone, it broke one or two of my scripts - so I ended up just changing the default back to master out of spite, and haven’t touched it since.
s/master/main
It took me all of 5 seconds to fix my automations when GitHub changed that. Also “forced” is a bit strong, they didn’t touch existing repos, and it’s only the default branch if you let GitHub initialize the repo (which I never do).
It’s not just about code, though. I have to write complicated procedures for my job (maintenance of large electrical and mechanical systems, not tech) and I was told I couldn’t designate a master procedure. I told that reviewer to pound sand, but if this trend takes hold it will unnecessarily complicate all kinds of work.
I was still a somewhat-clueless high school student at the time, and I had to create new repositories for every assignment in my CS electives. Niche, I know, but someone has to be the edge case…
(They used a dumpster fire home-grown autograder that couldn’t handle concepts like “assignment X is in directory Y.” Or any sort of file structure that deviated from the IntelliJ project layout. Supposedly they didn’t want to pay for a commercial service…)
