Nic @nicolagi@mastodon.sdf.org
.@alchemist Following your lead! Some Go (for now!) development on my 9front box. (Writing a small SigV4 package as an exercise, mostly.) Working on files mounted from a musclefs instance thousands of mile away (one of the windows shows the fs command console).
... but after all that's accurate and consistent, quite fitting for this OS. :)
git changing master to main by default
The argument against the word "master" is based on the unproven assumption that the term is loaded with racist connotations, and the mandate for change is based on the fact that the possibility of the assumption's truth is nonzero and that the side-effects of the change are small.
If that were true, I would be on board with it. However, it's plainly clear that the impact of git upstream switching the default branch name to "main" is going to be huge. Many scripts with the "master" hard-coded are going to break, scripts written on the valid assumption that the name "master" was an intrinsic, unchanging property of git.
Every programmer who works with repositories before and after the change are going to constantly mis-remember which is which, and we'll have to guess at the default when working with new or unfamiliar repositories.
This event is going to establish a new epoch in git. We should take that seriously.
Which means we have to confront the fact that the assumption (that inherent racism is present in the word "master" and is causing harm to those who have suffered under racism) may not actually be true. The claims do not hold up well under scrutiny. And, as far as I can tell, the cause is championed disproportionately by white people.
The moralized nature of the question puts an external pressure on decision makers on the git project, which is normally not present for other patches. They have to consider, if they review these changes negatively, will it affect their personal reputation? Their careers? If there's even a slight chance of this, is it better not to argue the matter at all, and rubber-stamp the patches? I don't think this change is being developed under the right conditions.
On the left, we have a tendency to rubber-stamp social causes with a lesser degree of scrutiny. I think that this is a testament to how much we value empathy and solidarity, but I don't think it's a healthy way to approach our problems. Software breakage has a social cost, too.
Posted an update on my Plan 9 phlog; probably will be the last for quite some time. Quick notes about irc, audio, video, fonts.
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/nicolagi/plan9phlog/misc1 #plan9 #bootcamp2020
Finally moving my VPS from vps2 to vps9... hoping it'll be smooth. But the related mailing list thread doesn't look promising: crossing fingers! #plan9 #bootcamp2020
Streaming #aNONradio on #plan9 ... I didn’t think this would work (because of missing drivers or something...) thanks #9front !!!
Last Friday I had some *dubious* debugging goals and I started adding log lines prefixed by "GOLF BALLS" to easily grep for those... #anonradio
Keeping a journal of my progress with #plan9 in gopher://sdf.org/1/users/nicolagi. #bootcamp2020
Ever since I learned about static sites I loved the idea of not having a backend for everything. If you have a blog or a portfolio why do you need a database or a dynamic language underneath?
@neauoire I guess my own definition of a purely plain text file is, like, a .txt file that's just meant for humans. Which is really restrictive, so maybe not that useful. But XML is also stored as "plain text", and so are a lot of other crazy things... is C code plain text? It's stored as text, but you have to treat it in a special way to do stuff with it. I looked up the definition on Wikipedia and other places, and there's a lot of disagreement apparently :P
Connected to my Plan 9 slice at SDF, built and installed and tested a program from my local fs via /mnt/term :) #plan9 #sdf #bootcamp2020
