Sounds like a flaw in your git client. It was always possible to change the default branch name, so hardcoding master was never right. You’re far from alone in making that assumption though! The good news is this makes everyone’s git tools more resilient.

> It’s not a huge pain, sure, but it isn’t nothing and I don’t get any benefit from it either

The entire notion here is accommodating people. It doesn’t benefit you personally but it does benefit others. And it’s not a huge pain. At a certain point we’re expending more energy debating doing this than if everyone just did it and moved on with their lives.

> Sounds like a flaw in your git client

It wasn't in the client, it was in the tests. You know like, here's a script that makes a test repo:

  git init
  git add foo.txt
  git commit -m "A"
  git switch -c develop
  git add bar.txt
  git commit -m "B"
  git merge master  # This will break soon.

> The entire notion here is accommodating people.

Is it though? It seems to me like the notion is appearing to accommodate people. I still haven't seen a single person say "my great grandfather was a slave and this offends me", only people saying "this might offend someone".

> I still haven't seen a single person say "my great grandfather was a slave and this offends me", only people saying "this might offend someone".

In today's world, it's enough for many companies. Si vis pacem, para bellum. You don't want to passively wait until you're attacked, you need to prepare the defenses first so your enemies don't even have a ground to stand.

If you strip away all the political outrage what’s actually happening on a technical level is that git is adding a new feature: customisable default branches. I imagine they will provide an option to use it (“git checkout —-default” or whatever) and yes, you’ll have to update your tests to accommodate it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tweak code because of an external API change that doesn’t benefit me personally. Often it involves using an entire new API because the old one is being retired! Compared to that this is a walk in the park. A couple of hours at most. And yet everyone is expending hours upon hours arguing about it.

Right but people are arguing about it because it is unnecessary! I bet if an API you use broke backwards compatibility just so it could `color` to `colour` you'd be arguing against it too!

OK so we’re finally at the actual core of the matter: the technical arguments aren’t actually valid, it’s that you don’t think it’s worth the minimal effort because you don’t personally know of anyone that is offended by the master/slave connotation of “master” branches. That’s always the actual core of the complaint yet everyone dances around it.

He didn't dance around it; it was the first thing he said. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26455182