A GitHub repository is where users and companies store and synchronize their source code projects.

By default, GitHub uses “master” to refer to the major version of the repository.

As of October 1, 2020, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named “Main” by default instead of “Master.”

However, it is important to note that existing repositories will not be affected by this change.

For now, this is a more middle ground approach that doesn’t have as much impact on older projects.

So why would you suddenly change “master” to “main”?

In June, influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, many people considered the word “master” to be a bad metaphor and racist.

The word “master” is used a lot in tech circles, but in an effort to calm the public, a number of tech giants have announced changes.

Such as:

MySQL has announced the removal of terms such as master, blacklist and whitelist.

Twitter, Microsoft, OpenSSL, The Android mobile operating system, the Go programming language, and others have all announced moves to remove or change such terms.

On June 8, noted tech blogger Scott Hanselman also posted a post calling for changing Git’s default branch from “master” to “main”.

Scott Hanselman argues in his article that the master-slave pointed out by IETF is an inappropriate metaphor, and this description is not accurate either technically or historically.

So he wants to change the description of the main branch to “main”.

In addition, he also gave a detailed revision plan. Check out his original blog:

www.hanselman.com/blog/Easily…

This blog, caused by the response is quite big.

Some are for it, others are against it.

Supporters say “main” is simple, easy to remember, and makes your black friend feel better.

Those who object say that changing “master” to “main” would have a big impact. There are so many open source projects, and there are so many long term open source projects, a change in one parent project, will affect many children and grandchildren of the project, there is no need.

And Petr Baudis, the person who coined the word “master” in Git in the first place, has taken a stand, saying he shouldn’t have used the potentially harmful word” master”.

Github CEO Nat Friedman also responded: Changing “master” to” main “is a great idea, and we’re already working on it!

Finally, in less than 10 days, Github has to implement the change from “master” to “main.”

In this regard, I saw some netizens joking that “you are master will become you are main” in the future

I’m going to change my master to my main.

I may live in a different environment, I may live in a different culture, but I sometimes think that in technology, it’s ok to use words like “master/slave” and “blacklist/whitelist”. There’s no need to be so broad-brush.