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Comment by jitbit | Hacker News Reader

GitHub: "Lets rename master to main because Inclusion & Equality"

Also GitHub: "sorry you're from a wrong country"

Github’s help text when opening a new repo irks me. It contains the following:

    git branch -m master main

With absolutely no explanation of what they are doing, or why. I can imagine this being confusing to beginners, and it requires mental effort for me to ignore it each time.

This cost me 20 minutes + lots of confusion when teaching a Git course to newbies some weeks ago. I switched to GitLab for the next group.

They seriously think "master" is a bad word? That's crazy.

To be fair, our industry brought this on itself -- we did use "master" and "slave" together as technical terms in various contexts. Now even the innocent uses of "master" that don't involve any reference to slavery are tainted too, at least from the perspective of a non-technical outsider. I'm sure their eyes will glaze over well before one can finish explaining what a version control system is, why you would want one, why it has branches and what they are used for, and that all this involves no references to slavery.

Well, just think of how many tutorials (aka 99.9%) iterate git master branch.

When new people start, they are going to wonder what master vs main branch is -- I guarantee it.

> Also GitHub: "sorry you're from a wrong country"

GitHub has no choice into the matter short of moving all it's infra in another country.

This is a political issue, pressure need to be put on political leaders to change that stupid law.

Not true. As per another commenter in this thread,

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account?

Answer

No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted. See FAQ 37

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