People have been reaching out to me asking why I have chosen to follow the woke ideology by making the move of changing the master branch name to main, and the answer is: I did not. I made the change for my own reasons.
Like most things from the woke bubble, the reasons given for the change by the Software Freedom Conservancy and GitHub are completely nuts. Leaving aside the fact that, from a biological viewpoint, different human races don’t even exist, slavery it not necessarily linked to what’s generally meant by racism. True, it’s a horrible thing to do to a human being and black people have been brought from the colonies to be slaves, but slavery is much older and could also happen to people from the same “race” and tribe in thousands of civilizations in human history. People could become slaves because they were heavily indebted, were considered bastards, believed in the “wrong” religion or as punishment.
The only thing the term “master” really implies is that it exerts control over someone or something, which just isn’t the case with a Git branch, and this is why I decided to do the change when the opportunity arose. Ever since I started using Git, I was a bit uncomfortable with the name “master” for the default branch because Git branches are completely independent of each other. Therefore “main”, “base” and even “trunk” seemed to suit it much better. The only reason I sticked to it was because you couldn’t change the default in Git and also not HEAD on GitHub, and one thing I learned as a developer is to never mess with standards if you don’t want to run into big big trouble some day. If everyone chose to not follow standards just because they don’t agree and think their own ideas are better, nothing works. Sometimes you just have to go along.
Then, suddenly, what I always thought would have been better actually became possible, even the new proposed standard, so I was more than happy to go along with it, regardless of the reasons. There was no reason to dig in my heels just to be a petulant child.
Free speech