HACKER Q&A
📣 joshxyz

Can't the GitHub switch from “master” to “main” be opt in?


Is it just me or it's weird as fuck?

There isn't even a way to opt-out, why do people jam shit like this onto their user's throats?

Yes it's politically correct but adding "git branch -M main" on every new repo the mankind creates is just a waste of goddamn bytes and kills a penguin every year for every extra cpu cycle it wastes.

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Edit:

Nevermind, turns out you can skip that "git branch -M main" step. I'm a fucking idiot I guess.

  👤 onion2k Accepted Answer ✓
Yes it's politically correct but adding "git branch -M main" on every new repo the mankind creates is just a waste of goddamn bytes and kills a penguin every year for every extra cpu cycle it wastes.

If you really want to use an environmental argument it's very likely that using a branch name that's 2 characters shorter on every merge to the main/master branch, every list of branches, every Github page that displays the main/master branch name, etc will save a far greater amount of energy than renaming repos will ever use. On a random repo homepage the word 'master' appears 31 times in the HTML content, so switching to 'main' would reduce the bandwidth on every single page load by 62 characters[1].

Any repo that opts out must be run by a climate change denier.

[1] Compression has been ignored to protect the argument.

👤 nikivi
It is opt in.

It's easy to change and it's nice that old branch histories will do directs to new branch.

https://github.com/github/renaming

👤 gnusty_gnurc
They need a reason to feel like they've accomplished something short of actually reducing suffering.

This stuff always gets sidelined into trivialities that are insulting to people who do, in fact, face injustice.

👤 eyeball
Stand by to be called a racist.