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No More Masters

3 points by yotamoron ↗ HN
The PC police is upon us - we are now renaming git master branch to main, as if not mentioning the terms 'slave' and 'master' will make any difference. So childish. Come on. What's next? renaming red-black tree, since it is offensive to both African-Americans AND native americans?

4 comments

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uberman
I think it is fairly clear that the master/slave nomenclature that is used in our discipline could make a large group of us uncomfortable.

I also feel that aliasing "master" to "trunk" or "main" and then flagging "master" as depreciated would have little cost to users.

I'm not sure how making this change could be considered childish.

yotamoron
I think it would be safe to assume, that there are many scripts floating around, that rely on the existence of master branch. Its like port 80 for http - you don't mention it, cause its never going to change, right? In any case, those who are offended need to grow up. No one thought about black slaves when calling the main branch master. Sometime a word is just a word.

Also, I don't understand why people are offended by it. I'm Jewish, if someone will call their application SS (for good reasons) I will not be offended. When people are talking about a gas chamber (when discussing SpaceX's engines of internal combustion engines etc) - I'm not offended. I just understand - this is the term used, it fits, it has nothing to do with me or with my history. That's all.

uberman
That is specifically why I suggest aliasing "master" to "main" or "trunk" and begin a depreciation period.

In theory "master" could always be supported but depreciated and simply removed from the documentation aside from footnotes indicating that "master" was an depreciated alias for "trunk".

I think the problem is exactly that:

"No one thought about black slaves when calling the main branch master"

As you say, it is just a word and to get upset about changing it seems rather childish to me.