We did it lads, racism is no more
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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And sexism! (Master is a gendered term, after all.)
Politics aside I didn't understood the "master" naming. I was framed by SCSI and always wondered which slaves that master controls.
If I recall correctly back then my mentor even explained t as "don't think of it like this kind of master, more like the source of truth and everything als derives from that".
Can someone explain to me (in the nostupidquestions sense!) what the "master" naming was actually intended to convey and why people are so on love with it (if there's something beyond "it's jr original name", while I personally don't follow this train of thought I can fully understand it).
A master is the original of something. For example, in the music industry when they printed records, they would print a master record from which duplicates would be made for manufacture. They still use the phrase mastering to describe finalising music in production.
Master copy has become widely used to mean the original version of something from which other copies are made.
Apparently the whole concept dates back to the renaissance where artists would learn by copying the works and techniques of a Master artist. Master in that context is referring to someone who is the best at what they do (the most famous renaissance artists are still referred to as the masters), which presumably derives from the honorific Master used to refer to a male teacher in English.
While perhaps understandable, moving away from Master to Main is based on ignorance of the fact the word has a totally different meaning and origin to master/slave. Ironically master/slave is also used in engineering and computer hardware to describe the relationship between a controlling piece of hardware and it's subordinates, but that is nothing to do with the source of truth use of master which comes from the concept of a master being the best at something (or now the best version of something).
Just a small correction about the records, the master isn’t printed. It’s a nickel negative made from electroplating the lacquer cut. The master is only used to make a few mothers, which are then used to make stampers. Those stampers make the actual pressings you buy.
The lacquer is actually the original of the record, unless you count the source tapes. It’s what was cut after mixing from the source recordings.
Thank you! It's fascinating that I never made the connection to other quite similar words (another user mentioned remastered for example).
Today ik one of the lucky 10,000.
"Master" is used in lots of circumstances as the "authoritive version". You've heard of films and music being "remastered"? Well that's because the version all the production copies are copies of is the "master". "Remastering" is the process of remaking the master.
This is the usage in git. It has nothing to do with slaves.
Oh my ... Thanks! The remastered made a audible click in my brain! Now it makes sense and I'm ready to move on :D
Git borrowed the term “master” from BitKeeper, the proprietary tool the Linux kernel used before Git existed.
In BitKeeper, a “master repository” referred to the authoritative repository in a set of distributed clones. When Linus Torvalds created Git in 2005, he followed that naming convention and called the primary branch “master”.
Should have followed Subversion so we'd have "trunk" with the branches coming off it.
The trunk metaphor doesn’t work very well in Git, because branches aren’t long-lived containers of sequential commits the way they are in SVN. There is no “root” commit that is guaranteed to have a consistent relationship with main, because branches are just names attached to a commit and can be reassigned at will.
huh I always assumed it was just taken from how HDD's used to work back in the way if you ran multiple on your machine. you had to designated on the motherboard and/or HDD which hard drive was the "Master" and which was the "Slave"
Waste of engineering effort and breakage for no good reason. Just dumb shit all around.
Whatever, guess it's done.
Massive if true
Main if true
I have version 2.52 and it is already the default.