Same for databases, master / slave does not really describe the relationship anymore. It’s a primary, secondary, read only or something else.
Comment on If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?
febra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m a developer. I use main/release/dev for new projects, because it just sounds better and more intuitive to me honestly. Old projects don’t get relabeled, they stay master. That’s my two cents.
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Wizzard@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That’s where you should use something more like top / bottom /s
I think in this sense, master is more akin to the ‘recording’ master - The best version of the recording to which others are generated, and all parts merged; no ‘slaves’ necessarily just the ‘master’.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think that’s because in computer science most master/slave nomenclature comes from hardware with a command/control structure (still notable in things like Spark where the namenode/master node controls the data nodes).
GIT just took naming conventions from other existing design patterns (although I should probably look up sources to verify that assumption).
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Master can also mean proficiency. If you say you’ve mastered a trade it doesn’t mean you enslaved the trade, you simply have complete knowledge of the trade.
So in that context, the master branch is the complete branch. The branch that other branches stem from because it’s the one with code from all the teams. You could branch from another team member’s branch but if that branch hasn’t merged from master in a while, it won’t have all the knowledge (code). When you merge in master you’re getting knowledge from elsewhere from the branch that’s aware of more things than your branch is: the branch that has mastery of the code, the master branch.
febra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s not how the terms entered computing though. We always used master in opposition of one or multiple slaves. It implies that one component has control and orders the other one around.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Did you know that most people are not developers, and for many other use cases “master” does in fact imply control?
febra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
We’re talking about computing here. At least the post does. I guess you could be a QA engineer or something else, but this discussion is mostly a thing with developers.
femtech@midwest.social 2 months ago
We renamed everything to keep shared pipelines working with one branch.
Zink@programming.dev 2 months ago
I look at “master” in our repo like you would refer to a master recording or a remaster, or similarly the gold master for when you could say a video game has gone gold.
febra@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t know what a master recording is. Googled it and it seems to be related to vinyl or something. So yeah, kind of hard for me to wrap my head around that, but definitely an interesting outlook.
orrk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
the master is the recording, all other recordings stem from
Scrollone@feddit.it 2 months ago
That’s why they used master. And this makes the whole “master is a bad word” stupid, at least in Git context.