DEV Community

Discussion on: Rename your master branch in Azure Repos

Collapse
 
jessehouwing profile image
Jesse Houwing • Edited

It's not 100% clear where the name master came from in Git. It likely came from BitKeeper, the source control system it replaced. Their docs talk about master and slave repositories. BitKeeper doesn't have a special concept for branches, it just sees them as another repo.

In the end it's often not what is meant by a name, it's how it's being interpreted. And many people use (correct or incorrect) the terms master and slave for forked repositories and for the main branch vs other branches.

We have good alternatives. There is no need to switch immediately. GitHub won't ban the usage of the term. But I do expect to see a change in defaults. There are many terms we could use instead to describe a similar relation between branches and repositories that do not have a possible negative connotation.