The idea that it is related to master/slave was guesswork based on the relation between Git and BitKeeper. But Git doesn’t have slaves and the guess was wrong.
Again, I wouldn’t blame anyone for following use which is common in the field. What disappoints me is that some people are so strongly opposed to using more accurate terms when they’re not even being asked to do the small amount of work. Maybe this is innocent, maybe it’s not, we could fix it now and never have to spend time on this conversation again.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I find it easy to miss things in Twitter threads.
> What disappoints me is that some people are so strongly opposed to using more accurate terms when they’re not even being asked to do the small amount of work.
> we could fix it now and never have to spend time on this conversation again.
I really hate this perception that changing master to main is easy. There’s 15 years of documentation out there that uses master. If it’s anything like other legacy documentation, it’ll take another ten years for that documentation to fall out of use.
In the meantime, there’s tonnes of young, inexperienced developers who will get stuck on this. Haven’t you ever seen a junior developer panic, think they are screwing up, and question their self-worth because they feel like they can’t even follow simple step-by-step instructions, when the problem is the documentation they are following is wrong?
The right way of doing this would be to coördinate via the main Git project and have a plan for what to do with all the existing documentation out there. As it stands, people unilaterally charged forward with it thoughtlessly, and are going to cause a great deal of practical pain for inexperienced developers, many of whom will be black. You really think triggering imposter syndrome in them is harmless?
My feeling is "we can block this now, say no and never spend time on this conversation again... or we can have this discussion any time the cultural fashion turns on another word currently in technical use."
I wouldn't be opposed to this if I thought this was the end of it.
> never have to spend time on this conversation again
There'll always be another word or someone else offended by things of zero consequence. Find it astonishing if you truly believe this is last word that needs to be "fixed".
> "master" as in e.g. "master recording". Perhaps you could say the original, but viewed from the production process perspective.
— https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441
The idea that it is related to master/slave was guesswork based on the relation between Git and BitKeeper. But Git doesn’t have slaves and the guess was wrong.