Is renaming Git master branches for inclusive language reasons going overboard? - tawaybayarea
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m0ck
As with many these pseudoproblems, it is initiative by white people to signal
virtue to other white people and show "moral superiority". I can't imagine
someone actually feeling uncomfortable over it, this isn't even case of
master/slave, "master" means just "primary" in this context. But I get it is
easier to solve than real problems the marginalized groups face (such as
police reform) and earn brownie points on Twitter (like with rainbow logos
coming and going away every year).

What I am afraid of the most is that eventually GitHub etc. will force
everyone to change names, including existing repositories, breaking CI
pipelines and other things in the process. Sounds absurd, but unfortunately
very possible in today's climate.

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eesmith
Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Because the first time I heard about it was from 17 years ago when a black man
complained about the use of master/slave and filed an EEOC complaint. See
[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-
check/masterslave/) .

Your hypothesis is that virtue signaling describes the movement to get rid of
the term.

Have you considered that the term master/slave was popularized and maintained
as a form of virtue signaling?

Quoting from "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical
Literature" by Ron Eglash" available from [https://sci-
hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066](https://sci-hub.st/10.1353/tech.2007.0066) :

> ... being unconscious of social mores was a good sign for a future
> physicist, because physics transcends culture. Perhaps this kind of emphasis
> on a technical identity is at work here, too, and the master-slave metaphor
> is attractive to engineers because its free use “proves” that they inhabit a
> nonsocial or culture-free realm, which is a matter of professional pride

~~~
m0ck
You read my post wrong. I said explicitly this is NOT a master/slave
situation, "master" has completely different meaning here, there is not any
"slave" branch under its rule.

I agree the master/slave pair itself is a weird terminology to use (especially
the slave part), but master branch, master degree, master ball in Pokemon
games are all fine in my book.

Context matters. This is not far away from attacking anything associated with
words white/black.

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ironmagma
Depends what going overboard means. Is it a waste of time? Well, it doesn’t
take that much time, so no. Is it effective at fighting racism? My bets are on
the number of people before and after the change who are racist being exactly
the same. Whether it’s effective or not is dubious because we have no way of
doing a measurement. Aren’t there some evidence-backed ways of fighting racism
we can look at instead?

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quattrofan
Agreed, this is token nonsense. No-one ever became racist because a MySQL
server was referred to as a slave and no racist will stop being one if they
are now called "Secondary" or something.

~~~
sh461
It makes some sense to remove the term slave since it's a direct reference to
slavery and there are a bunch of other terms that you can use which won't be
offensive and will also be more descriptive and professional. Master on the
other hand has multiple different uses and meanings most of which have nothing
to do with slavery. Changing the naming of git branches seems like a massive
overreaction, doesn't achieve anything substantial and it also sets a strange
precedent in which one use case of a word damages all others.

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simonblack
Will "Digital Remastering" become "Digital Remaining"?

A little more thought should be made before we hastily insist on major changes
to everyday language.

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scott31
It is just a start, even the word 'git' is offensive to some people.

